Whatever Happened To TQM (Total Quality Management)?

Total: TQM looks at the whole business and how what’s happening in each section - sales, manufacture, accounts, customer service - can integrate to deliver a quality product that matches customer requirements. Total, too, in respect of making it the responsibility of people in all departments no matter what their function. Each has to realise that whatever it is they are doing adds to the quality of the final product. This approach achieves the most competitive cost position and highest level of customer satisfaction.

Quality: refers to the total customer experience. It’s not enough to deliver only a defect free product – it should be delivered on time, to the right place and at the right cost. Those are all parts of ‘quality’ too.

Management: total quality doesn’t just happen. An active management process driven from the top has to ensure the systems and processes are in place to <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">ensure it happens. That means communicating the business vision and values to all employees; ensuring the right business processes are in place; and creating a culture that promotes input by your team members towards continuous improvement of work practices.

Businesses that took to a TQM system quickly found they needed to emphasise the 3Cs – Customers, Culture, and Counting.

Customers: Let the users of products or services define what they want rather than have their needs defined by the design team or sales people. In TQM, customer needs and expectations, not in-house standards, define quality. No matter how good your products and services are by some ‘objective’ standard, they don’t have total quality unless they meet your customer’s needs.

Culture: a number of things go towards creating the sort of culture that encourages TQM among the team. For instance, the traditional management approach is to tolerate a certain level of errors and waste as inevitable. Things got inspected after they were produced and rejected if not up to standard. But TQM focuses on <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">improving the individual processes that go towards creating a product so that the end product turns up error free as part of the process. In fact TQM studies suggest that as much as 85% of error in production is commonly due to systems (the way management sets up work to be done), rather than employee mistakes. TQM actually works on the basis that by improving the culture through increased employee input and responsibility, there will also be a series of small, incremental gains in productivity and quality resulting from daily attention to enhancing how work is done.

Counting: TQM places a lot of importance in knowing just how well each area of the business is performing and encourages the use of measurement tools – not just for financial indicators either, but of all your key performance indicators, as well as check sheets, run charts, and so on that keep processes on track.

TQM takes a ‘whole business’ approach so definition tend to be wordy trying to catch all the ideas: Total Quality Management is a structured system for satisfying internal and external customers and suppliers by integrating the business environment, continuous improvement, and breakthroughs with development, improvement, and maintenance cycles while changing organisational culture.

Phew! But if many of these concepts sound familiar it’s because the ideas still inform current business practice. Try and run a 21st century business without the majority of them in your list of strategies and you’ll fail. Yes, TQM is still with us. It may not be calling itself by its original name, but it can certainly be recognised in the way businesses are operating.