Total Quality Management (TQM)

Quality has become the most important word in the corporate lexicon. The term ‘Quality’ refers to a sense of appreciation that something is better than something else. According to Edward Deming, TQM is a way of creating an organizational culture, committed to the continuous improvement of skills, teamwork, processes, product and service quality and customer satisfaction. It is built around four basic ideas:-

1. Do it right the first time:-  Manager have been interested in the quality of their product. The emphasis on quality has come through four distinct phases. Each stage of this evolution has broadened the responsibility for quality. The focus has shifted from relatively fixing product defects to proactively working to prevent them and to satisfy customers completely. The four phases are:-

a. The fix it in approach to quality:- Rework any defective products identified by quality inspectors at the end of the production process.

b.The inspect it in approach to quality:- Here, quality inspectors sample work in process and prescribe machine adjustments to avoid substandard outputs.

c. The built it in approach to quality:- Make everyone who touches the product, responsible for spotting and correcting defects. Emphasis is on identifying and eliminating causes of quality problems.

1. The design it in approach to quality:- Intense customer and employee involvement drives the entire design production cycle. Emphasis is on continuous improvement of personnel, processes and product.
2. Be customer-centered:- Organizations have to meet the expectations of both internal as well as external customers. Internal customers are those who members of the organization who depends on others to get their work done, for eg., a corporate lawyer. As far as external customers, TQM demands all employees who deal directly with outsiders to be customer-centered. Customer-centered means:-

a. Anticipating the customers’ need;

b.Listening to the customers;

c. Learning how to satisfy the customers;

1. Responding appropriately to the customers.
2. Making continuous improvement a way of life:-  It means improving the overall system by constantly improving the little details. It looks at quality as an endless journey. In order to improve, they experiment, measure, adjust continuously. The four ways to achieve improvement are:-

a. Improved and more consistent product and service quality.

b.Faster cycle times, i.e., from product development to order processing to payroll processing.

c. Greater flexibility, i.e., faster response to changing customer demands and new technology.

1. Lower costs and less waste, i.e., eliminating needless steps, scrap rework and non-value adding activities.
2. Build teamwork and empowerment:-  TQM is built around employees, their needs, aspiration and expectations. Empowerment takes place when employees are properly trained, provided with all relevant information and the best possible tools, fully involved in key decisions and fairly rewarded for results. In order to carry out work effectively and efficiently, teams have to be created, drawing talent from various departments in a cooperative way.