Total quality management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs.

Total Quality provides an umbrella under which everyone in the organization can strive and create customer satisfaction at continually lower real costs.

Definition

TQM is composed of three paradigms:

• Total: Involving the entire organization, supply chain, and/or product life cycle
• Quality: With its usual Definitions, with all its complexities (External Definition)
• Management: The system of managing with steps like Plan, Organize, Control, Lead, Staff, provisioning and suchlike.

As defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO):

"TQM is a management approach for an organization, centered on quality, based on the participation of all its members and aiming at long-term success through customer satisfaction, and benefits to all members of the organization and to society."

One major aim is to reduce variation from every process so that greater consistency of effort is obtained. (Royse, D., Thyer, B., Padgett D., & Logan T., 2006)

In Japan, TQM comprises four process steps, namely:

1. Kaizen – Focuses on "Continuous Process Improvement", to make processes visible, repeatable and measurable.
2. Atarimae Hinshitsu – The idea that "things will work as they are supposed to" (for example, a pen will write).
3. Kansei – Examining the way the user applies the product leads to improvement in the product itself.
4. Miryokuteki Hinshitsu – The idea that "things should have an aesthetic quality" (for example, a pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer).

TQM requires that the company maintain this quality standard in all aspects of its business. This requires ensuring that things are done right the first time and that defects and waste are eliminated from operations.

A Comprehensive Definition

TQM Total Quality Management is the management of total quality. We know that management consists of planning, organizing, directing, control, and assurance. Then, one has to define "total quality". Total quality is called total because it consists of 3 qualities : Quality of return to satisfy the needs of the shareholders, Quality of products and services to satisfy some specific needs of the consumer (end user) and Quality of life - at work and outside work - to satisfy the needs of the people in the organization. This is achieved with the help of upstream and downstream partners of the enterprise. To this, we have to add the corporate citizenship, i.e. the social, technological, economical, political, and ecological (STEPE) responsibility of the enterprise concerning its internal (its people) and external (upstream and downstream) partners, and community. Therefore, Total quality management goes well beyond satisfying the customer, or merely offering quality products (goods and/or services). Note that we use the term consumer or end customer. The reason is that in a Supply Chain Management approach, we don't have to satisfy our customers' needs but the needs of our customers' customers' all the way to the end customer, the consumer of a product and/or service. By applying this definition an enterprise achieves Business Excellence, as suggested by the Malcolm Baldrige (American) and the EFQM (European) Performance Excellence Models. To do that, one has to go well beyond ISO 9000 Standards series as suggested by these standards (ISO 9001, then ISO 9004, then Total Quality).

Origins

"Total Quality Control" was the key concept of Armand Feigenbaum's 1951 book, Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration, a book that was subsequently released in 1961 under the title, Total Quality Control (ISBN 0-07-020353-9).W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Philip B. Crosby, and Kaoru Ishikawa also contributed to the body of knowledge now known as TQM.

The American Society for Quality says that the term Total Quality Management was used by the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command "to describe its Japanese-style management approach to quality improvement."[1] This is consistent with the story that the United States Navy Personnel Research and Development Center began researching the use of statistical process control (SPC); the work of Juran, Crosby, and Ishikawa; and the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming to make performance improvements in 1984. This approach was first tested at the North Island Naval Aviation Depot.

In his paper, "The Making of TQM: History and Margins of the Hi(gh)-Story" from 1994, Xu claims that "Total Quality Control" is translated incorrectly from Japanese since there is no difference between the words "control" and "management" in Japanese. William Golimski refers to Koji Kobayashi, former CEO of NEC, being the first to use TQM, which he did during a speech when he got the Deming Prize in 1974.

TQM in manufacturing

Quality assurance through statistical methods is a key component in a manufacturing organization, where TQM generally starts by sampling a random selection of the product. The sample can then be tested for things that matter most to the end users. The causes of any failures are isolated, secondary measures of the production process are designed, and then the causes of the failure are corrected. The statistical distributions of important measurements are tracked. When parts' measures drift into a defined "error band", the process is fixed. The error band is usually a tighter distribution than the "failure band", so that the production process is fixed before failing parts can be produced.

It is important to record not just the measurement ranges, but what failures caused them to be chosen. In that way, cheaper fixes can be substituted later (say, when the product is redesigned) with no loss of quality. After TQM has been in use, it's very common for parts to be redesigned so that critical measurements either cease to exist, or become much wider.

It took people a while to develop tests to find emergent problems. One popular test is a "life test" in which the sample product is operated until a part fails. Another popular test is called "shake and bake", in which the product is mounted on a vibrator in an environmental oven, and operated at progressively more extreme vibration and temperatures until something fails. The failure is then isolated and engineers design an improvement.

A commonly-discovered failure is for the product to disintegrate. If fasteners fail, the improvements might be to use measured-tension nutdrivers to ensure that screws don't come off, or improved adhesives to ensure that parts remain glued.

If a gearbox wears out first, a typical engineering design improvement might be to substitute a brushless stepper motor for a DC motor with a gearbox. The improvement is that a stepper motor has no brushes or gears to wear out, so it lasts ten or more times as long. The stepper motor is more expensive than a DC motor, but cheaper than a DC motor combined with a gearbox. The electronics are radically different, but equally expensive. One disadvantage might be that a stepper motor can hum or whine, and usually needs noise-isolating mounts.

Often, a "TQMed" product is cheaper to produce because of efficiency/performance improvements and because there's no need to repair dead-on-arrival products, which represents an immensely more desirable product.

TQM and contingency-based research

TQM has not been independent of its environment. In the context of management accounting systems (MCSs), Sim and Killough (1998) show that incentive pay enhanced the positive effects of TQM on customer and quality performance. Ittner and Larcker (1995) demonstrated that product focused TQM was linked to timely problem solving information and flexible revisions to reward systems. Chendall (2003) summarizes the findings from contingency-based research concerning management control systems and TQM by noting that “TQM is associated with broadly based MCSs including timely, flexible, externally focused information; close interactions between advanced technologies and strategy; and non-financial performance measurement.” (p.143)

TQM, just another Management fad?

Abrahamson (1996) argued that fashionable management discourse such as Quality Circles tends to follow a lifecycle in the form of a bell curve. Ponzi and Koenig (2002) showed that the same can be said about TQM, which peaked between 1992 and 1996, while rapidly losing popularity in terms of citations after these years. Dubois (2002) argued that the use of the term TQM in management discourse created a positive utility regardless of what managers meant by it (which showed a large variation), while in the late 1990s the usage of the term TQM in implementation of reforms lost the positive utility attached to the mere fact of using the term and sometimes associations with TQM became even negative.(Wilkinson et al 1998) Nevertheless, management concepts such as TQM leave their traces, as their core ideas can be very valuable.(Hill and Wilkinson 1995) For example, Dubois (2002) showed that the core ideas behind the two management fads Reengineering and TQM, without explicit usage of their names, can even work in a synergistic way.

TQM Appraisal

Currently, TQM is incorporated to and commonly evaluated by ISO-based QMS with the ISO 9001 followed by ISO 14001 certifications ^{, ,} . ISO/TS 16949, ISO 22000, ISO/TS 29001, ISO/IEC 20000 and ISO/IEC 27001 are sometimes also disciplinary applied. Other certification of measurements may include, but is not limited to

• SA 8000
• HACCP
• OHSAS 18001
• EurepGAP
• BRC
• AS 9100 QMS
• CE Mark
• QS system - China
• STQC India Safety Mark
• GxP - particularly pharmaceutical industry

References

• Abrahamson, E. (1996). "Management fashion." Academy of Management Review. 21(1):254-285.

• Bergman, Bo & Klefsjö,Bengt, Kvalitet - från behov till användning, ISBN 91-44-01917-3, Studentlitteratur: Sweden, Lund,2001.

• Chenhall, RH (2003) Management control systems design within its organizational context: findings from contingency-based research and directions for the future, Accounting, Organizations and Society 28, pp. 127-168.

• Cerza, Oliver (2004). Quality management in the medical appliances sector. WiKu Editions Paris EURL. ISBN 2-84976-002-1.

• Dubois, HFW (2002). "Harmonization of the European vaccination policy and the role TQM and reengineering could play". Quality Management in Health Care. 10 (2): 47–57. PMID 11799830. "PDF"

• Hill ,S and A.Wilkinson (1995)In search of TQM .Employee Relations Vol 17 no 3 pp8-26.

• Horine, Julie and Carl Edwin Lindgren. (April 1995). Educational improvement using Deming's profound knowledge. New Era in Education (London), Volume 76, Number 1:6-10.

• Horine, Julie, Paul Yvarra, Carl Edwin Lindgren. (Winter/1994). A historical and educational view of the theory contained in Deming's profound knowledge. Education, Volume 115, Number 2: 288-291 & 194.

• Horine, Julie and Carl Edwin Lindgren. (1994). Quality management in 21st century education, Educational Review, Volume 100, Number 7:101-105.

• Ittner, CD and Larcker, DF (1995) Total quality management and the choice of information and reward systems, Journal of Accounting Research 33(suppl.), pp. 1-34.

• Ponzi, L and Koenig, M (2002) "Knowledge management: another management fad?" Information Research, 8(1)

• Royse, D., Thyer, B., Padgett, D., & Logan T., (2006). Program Evaluation: An Introduction 4th edition, Thomson Brooks/Cole, Belmont, CA pp. 151

• Sim, KL and Killough, LN (1998) The performance effects of complementarities between manufacturing practices and management accounting systems, Journal of Management Accounting Research 10, pp.325-346.

• "A Few Words about TQM" by John Stark, John Stark Associates, retrieved December 5, 2005.

• Wilkinson A et al (1998)Managing through TQM . London .Macmillan

• ASTM STP1209 Quality and Statistics: Total Quality Management
• ASTM MNL22 Total Quality Management: Guiding Principles for Application

• J.N.Kelada, 1996, "Integrating Reengineering with Total Quality", Quality Press, Wisconsin.

See also

• Business models
• Environmental management
• Environmental Quality Management
• European Foundation for Quality Management,
• Hawthorne effect

• Lean Manufacturing
• Liquid Logistics
• Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
• Operations management
• Process improvement
• Process management
• Performance audit

• Quality Function Deployment
• Quality management
• Quality management system
• Reengineering
• Six Sigma
• Statistical process control

External links

• TQM And Organizational Change And Development by Thomas Packard, D.S.W., [2]
• American Society for Quality, [3]

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