What Is Total Quality Management?
Total quality management (TQM) describes a management system wherein a company attains organizational advancement through a commitment to customer requirements. A company meets those requirements when it empowers every employee in every department to maintain high standards
What Is Total Quality Management?
Total quality management (TQM) describes a management system wherein a company attains organizational advancement through a commitment to customer requirements. A company meets those requirements when it empowers every employee in every department to maintain high standards and strive for continuous improvement. Total quality management is the predecessor of many quality management systems, such as Six Sigma, Lean, and ISO.
What Is Quality Management?
First, what is quality? It is a measure of the level of acceptability of a product or service. The ASQ Quality Glossary defines quality management as “the application of a quality management system in managing a process to achieve maximum customer satisfaction at the lowest overall cost to the organization while continuing to improve the process.” Quality management has four parts: quality planning, quality assurance (defect prevention), quality control (which includes product inspection and other elements, such as competence), and quality improvement.
Why would it take until the 20th century to apply such seemingly obvious principles like product goals and parts inspection? Perhaps the right historical circumstances didn’t present themselves until the 20th century. Nichols credits new mass-production techniques, such as Ford’s assembly line, and the urgent demand for materials during two world wars for this particular innovation. “The US military demanded to some extent that every product they purchased be good because soldiers lives literally depended on the quality of the products they handled,” says Nichols. “Whether it was for K rations or bullets, these wars spurred a manufacturing revolution to focus on the idea of getting things right every time.”
Statistics play an integral part in quality management because being able to predict accuracy through numbers is much less expensive than inspecting parts. Moreover, sometimes inspection is simply inconvenient. “McDonald's needs to know that every burger is right without having to take a bite out of each one,” says Nichols.
Total Quality Management Principles
No single accepted body of knowledge exists for total quality management, as does, for example, the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) for the Project Management Institute. Similarly, no prescribed actions exist for implementing TQM methods and tools. Organizations have been free to deploy and adapt TQM as they see fit, giving way to many definitions of the methodology. Despite these challenges to standardization, it’s possible to describe generally accepted principles:
- Customer Satisfaction
- Employee Commitment: This creates empowerment through training and suggestion mechanisms.
- Fact-Based Decision Making: Teams collect data and process statistics to ensure that work meets specifications.
- Effective Communications: There should be an open dialogue throughout an organization.
- Strategic Thinking: Quality must be part of an organization’s long-term vision.
- Integrated System: A shared vision, including knowledge of and commitment to principles of quality, keep everyone in a company connected. Taiichi Ohno recognized that even suppliers are an important part of the system.
- Process-Centered: You can deconstruct every activity into processes, and, therefore, locate and repeat the best process.
- Continuous Improvement: Every employee should always be thinking about how to better perform their job.
You could sum up the goal of TQM in this way: “Do things right the first time, every time.”
The History of Total Quality Management
There is no single, agreed-upon source for the phrase total quality management. Some experts believe it came from two books by seminal quality management thinkers: Armand Feigenbaum’s Total Quality Control and Kaoru Ishikawa's What Is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way. Others say the terminology arose from an initiative in the United States Navy to adopt quality management guru William Deming’s recommendations, which they termed total quality management. TQM did not enjoy widespread acceptance until the 1980s.
The roots of the principles and practice of TQM extend back to the early 20th century and Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, which advocated a consistent way of performing tasks and inspecting finished work to prevent defective products from leaving the shop. Further innovation came in the 1920s with Walter Shewhart’s elaboration of statistical process controls, which one could apply at any point in the production process to predict quality levels. It was Shewhart who developed the control chart, used today for managing with Kanban and Agile.
Throughout the 20s and 30s, Shewhart’s friend and mentee, William Deming, developed statistical process control theories that he would eventually use to help the US Census department in the early 1940s. This was the first use of statistical process control in a non-manufacturing field.
The Beginning of the Quality Era in Japan
After the war, other American quality theorists, including Deming, who would achieve hero status in Japan, advised Japanese industry on how to improve processes and output to rebuild their war-shattered economy. At the time, the term made in Japan was synonymous with shoddy craftsmanship. As early as 1945, such visionaries as electrical engineer Homer Sarasohn spoke about controlling variation and monitoring process to produce better deliverables.
As a result, in the 1950s, quality became the byword for Japanese manufacturing. Quality concerned not just management, but all levels of a company. In the 1960s, quality circles began appearing in Japanese workplaces to allow employees the opportunity to discuss problems and consider solutions, which they then presented to man