Talk:Total quality management/Archives/2011

Article is a total mess and fails to even explain what TQM is; candidate for deletion?

Update: Okay, I've figured out how to nominate the article for deletion and done so. Below is what I originally wrote. In summary, the reason I think this should be deleted is that none of the sentences have any discernible meaning but instead are just jumbles of undefined jargon words. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.145.92.145 (talk) 19:31, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't even know where to start listing everything that is wrong with this article. It just doesn't actually tell you anything, and the writing style is appalling. Every single sentence has a problem with it.

  Since the late 1980s, firms around the world have launched Total Quality Management (TQM) programs

Wouldn't it make sense to tell the reader what TQM is before telling them about when and where it is used?

  in an attempt to retain or regain competitiveness in order to achieve customer satisfaction

I thought businesses attempted to satisfy customers in order to stay competitive, not the other way round.

 in the face of increasing competition from around the world in this era of globalization

This sounds like something out of an advert and doesn't add any information to the sentence.

 TQM is an integrative philosophy of management

What does that mean? I can't even find a definition of 'integrative' in the business sense anywhere on Google.

 for continuously improving the quality of products and processes

Okay, so we finally find out the purpose of TQM at the end of a fairly difficult and tiring first paragraph. Shouldn't this be the first thing about TQM we are told?

 TQM functions on the premise that the quality of the products and processes is the responsibility of everyone who is involved with the creation or consumption of the products or services offered by the organization

How so? What does this actually mean?

 In other words, TQM capitalizes on the involvement of management, workforce, suppliers, and even customers

Involvement in what? What kind of involvement? How does TQM capitalize on that involvement? I thought TQM was a philosophy of management; how does a philosophy capitalize on something? This is gibberish.

 in order to meet or exceed customer expectations

Besides the fact that this again sounds like an advert, it once again is sufficiently vague to not really mean anything. For starters, is meeting or exceeding customer expectations merely the objective or is it something that has been observed to happen when firms use TQM? If so, how often - always, usually, sometimes? What kind of expectations are we talking about here?

 Considering the practices of TQM

What does that mean?

 as discussed in six empirical studies

Studies of what? Discussed in what way?

 Cua, McKone, and Schroeder

Who are they and are they accepted as an authority on the subject?

 identified the nine common TQM practices

Again, what does this mean?

 cross-functional product design, process management, supplier quality management, customer involvement, information and feedback, committed leadership, strategic planning, cross-functional training, and employee involvement

What do any of those terms mean in this context?

By the end of the first section of the article, I still have no idea what TQM is, mainly because most of the sentences are devoid of actual meaning.

Then the article gets worse as we enter the six sigma section.

 The Six Sigma process improvement

Wait, Six Sigma is a 'process improvement'? What does that mean here, exactly? According to the Six Sigma page, it's a 'business management strategy'. That doesn't sound like a 'process improvement' to me.

 originated in 1986 from Motorola’s drive towards reducing defects by minimizing variation in processes through metrics measurement

Defects in what? Minimizing what kind of variation in which processes? Measuring what metrics? How does that relate to minimizing variation?

 Applications of the Six Sigma project execution methodology

What's that?

 have since expanded to include practices

What does it mean for an application of a methodology to expand to include a practice?

 common in Total Quality Management and Supply Chain Management

What is Supply Chain Management and how is it relevant?

 such as increasing customer satisfaction

How is that a practice? It sounds more like an outcome.

 The main difference between TQM and Six Sigma (a newer concept)

Wait, TQM started in 'the late 1980s', and Six Sigma started in 1986, but is newer?

 TQM tries to improve quality by ensuring conformance to internal requirements, while Six Sigma focuses on improving quality by reducing the number of defects and impurities

What do each of those mean, and how are they different from each other?

The whole article is just shit. Nowhere is it explained what TQM is or how it works. We don't know who uses it or how. How Six Sigma is even relevant to TQM is not clear, yet the section on Six Sigma is almost half the article. Can somebody please nominate this for deletion?

TQM is a very important concept, deleting the article is not the solution, and it is accurate enough, please try to fix stuff that you see broken in this article, rather than suggesting deletion.Pm master 19:45, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

There's nothing to 'fix'. This article has no meaningful content, it's completely incomprehensible, so there's no way anyone can 'fix' the broken stuff. To quote Wikipedia:Patent_nonsense, "If the meaning cannot be identified, it is impossible to accurately copy-edit the text". I find the claim that the article is 'accurate' laughable when it's impossible to discern the meaning of it. At best, someone who knows something about the topic and can find some good sources (I don't and can't) could possibly write a new article on TQM to replace this one if the concept is indeed important as you claim, but the article is useless as it stands and doesn't provide a basis for a fresh article. Unless you can explain what at least some of the sentences in the article mean, I'm going to reinstate the deletion tag.

Unless you can explain what at least some of the sentences in the article mean, I'm going to reinstate the deletion tag. First please drop the attitude, this is not the place. Since "you don't and you can't" then my guess is that you know absolutely nothing about the topic. I have read all your points and, with the exception of one, none made sense. The article needs to be expanded, not deleted. Feel free to expand it if you feel you know something about the topic. PS: The concept is important, check the top of the page "This article has been rated as High-priority on the project's priority scale." Pm master 23:15, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I have to agree with you though that the first paragraph should be either rewritten or completely removed. Pm master 23:29, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Firstly, fair enough on the attitude, I was being a bit snarky and there was no need. I apologise for that. You're also correct that I know nothing about TQM besides what I can find on Google. I'm not really sure why you say that only one of my points made sense (which one, btw?) since they seem pretty clear to me; essentially, I don't fully understand what a single sentence in this article means despite making an effort, and I'm fairly sure that's because it's gibberish. I maintain that unless somebody can explain the intended meaning of some of the sentences in the article so they can be rewritten in a comprehensible way, it needs to be deleted or substantially trimmed and rewritten as a stub. Here's what little meaning I've been able to get out of the article so far (with questions from me in brackets):

Total Quality Management is a management strategy for improving the quality of products or processes (how?). It involves management, the workforce, suppliers and customers (how does it involve them?).

A related management strategy is Six Sigma, which is also a strategy for improving quality (of what?). Six Sigma does so by reducing the number of defects and impurities (in what? How?).

Can you answer the questions in brackets above, and can you translate any of the other sentences in the article into intelligible English? If not, I'm still inclined to reinstate a deletion tag (but I'll let you have your say first). 86.145.92.145 (talk) 00:13, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

OK, I understand. For the first question, the answer is to elaborate on the points, if the "how" is not discussed then it doesn't mean we have to delete the article. So what we need is to expand the article. As for the second question, Six sigma also improves the quality of the product/process. It reduces the defects and impurities in the product/process. Detailing how Six Sigma reduces the defects and impurities is outside the scope of this article, refer to the Six Sigma article for more. I hope I answered your questions.Pm master 00:34, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Article cleanup and removal of things that don't make sense

I've made significant changes to the article in order to improve the English and writing style, and to remove parts which simply don't make sense.

Firstly, I've removed both the claim that TQM originated in the late 1980s and the claim that Six Sigma, which originated in 1986, is 'newer', since these contradict each other so at least one must be false. I don't know which, so I'll leave someone to reintroduce one of the claims if they can source it.

Secondly, I've removed fluff from the first paragraph that didn't add any meaning, and stripped it down to the actual point that TQM is a management strategy which aims to improve the quality of products and processes. In particular:

• I've removed the point about it being used 'around the world', since this is extremely vague
• I've removed the point about it being used to 'retain or regain competitiveness in order to acheive customer satisfaction', since businesses (with the rare exceptions of altruistic ones whose primary objective is non-commercial) want to satisfy customers in order to get repeat business in order to be competitive, not the other way around
• I've removed the irrelevant mentions of increasing competition and the 'era of globalisation'
• I've removed the description of TQM as an 'integrative philosophy', since that term isn't defined in the article and I have no idea what it's supposed to mean.

Thirdly, I've condensed the first two sentences of the second paragraph into one sentence which contains all the information that the old two did.

Fourthly, I've deleted this sentence entirely: "Considering the practices of TQM as discussed in six empirical studies, Cua, McKone, and Schroeder (2001) identified the nine common TQM practices as cross-functional product design, process management, supplier quality management, customer involvement, information and feedback, committed leadership, strategic planning, cross-functional training, and employee involvement."

I did so because I believe it is too unclear to add anything to the article. It is unclear because:

• It's not clear what is meant by a 'TQM practice' or a 'practice of TQM'
• It's not indicated what the 'empirical studies' were of, or how they were used by Cua, McKone, and Schroeder
• It's not clear how the nine 'practices' listed are related to TQM
• All of the nine practices listed are incredibly vague, and indeed some are things that are a necessary part of any kind of business anyway, such as 'employee involvement' or 'information and feedback'

Fifthly, I made several changes to the Six Sigma section:

• I changed the section about Six Sigma to refer Six Sigma as a 'management strategy', as per the Six Sigma article, rather than as a 'process improvement', which doesn't make sense.
• I removed 'by metrics measurement' for two reasons. Firstly, 'metrics measurement' is a tautology; a metric is a system of measurement, or a way of measuring something, so 'metrics measurement' literally means 'measuring things that you measure', or indeed simply 'measurement'. Secondly, you can't acheive anything simply by measurement; you need to act on the results of those measurements. So it doesn't make any sense to say that Six Sigma reduces variation by measuring things.
• I deleted the entire second sentence of the section, because it's an incomprehensible mess. What on earth is 'Applications of the Six Sigma project execution methodology have since expanded to include practices common in Total Quality Management' supposed to mean?
• I've deleted the final sentence, 'TQM tries to improve quality by ensuring conformance to internal requirements, while Six Sigma focuses on improving quality by reducing the number of defects and impurities', for two reasons. Firstly, 'reducing variation' and 'ensuring conformance' are synonyms, and we've already been told that Six Sigma aims to 'reduce variation', so saying that TQM DIFFERS from Six Sigma because it 'ensures confrmance' appears to be a logical contradiction. Secondly, according to the Six Sigma article, Six Sigma DEFINES quality in terms of the number/rate of defects, so saying that Six Sigma aims to improve quality by reducing the number of defects is again another tautology; you're simply saying that Six Sigma aims to reduce the number of defects by reducing the number of defects.

You've reduced the article to a stub, the article needs to be elaborated, and not the other way around. This is your first edit, and the article was written by many other contributors, your opinion still counts, but that doesn't mean you reduce the article to a stub just because you think it's better this way. Thanks.Pm master 12:13, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

You say I've reduced the article to a stub but I have barely removed any information. The only substantial removal was the bit about Cua, McKone and Schroeder. I wish you had responded to my actual points and said whether you consider them valid, and if not, why not.

I'm certainly not content to leave the article as it stands because, as explained above, there are parts that are tautological, contradictory, or simply don't make sense. If you think I've gone too far with the previous rewrite, I guess we can compromise and I'll leave in the stuff about Cua, McKone and Schroeder and some of the vaguer details, and leave the writing style alone except to fix grammar. I do think, however, that the following things really NEED to be changed:

1) The phrase 'in an attempt to retain or regain competitiveness in order to acheive customer satisfaction' should be removed because customer satisfaction isn't the objective of being competitive, nor does it result from it. '...in the face of increasing competition from around the world in this era of globalization' should be removed since it is irrelevant, and furthermore having that phrase in there suggests that the primary driving force for firms adopting TQM is international competition, which probably isn't true and at any rate needs to be sourced. In addition to the previous points, the references to competitiveness need to be removed because TQM is used not only by competitive commercial enterprises but also by non-commercial organisations such as government departments who are not involved in any kind of competition. Finally, we should remove the reference to 'firms' because TQM is, again, not limited to firms. Combined with point 2 below, this means the entire first sentence needs to be removed, although to ensure no actual content is lost, we can add in a sentence saying 'TQM is used around the world.' since this is the only other piece of info in the first sentence.

2) The claim that TQM began in the late 1980s should be removed since later in the article this is contradicted by the claim that it began before 1986 (since it predates Six Sigma). What's more, people have referred in the talk page to sources using the term Total Quality Management decades earlier than this, so clearly it is false.

3) 'The Six Sigma process improvement' needs to be changed to 'The Six Sigma management strategy', since Six Sigma is a management strategy, not a 'process improvement'.

4) 'through metrics measurement' needs to be removed since you can't improve things through measurement, and 'metrics measurement' is a tautology anyway.

5) 'Applications of the Six Sigma project execution methodology have since expanded to include practices common in Total Quality Management and Supply Chain Management, such as increasing customer satisfaction, and developing closer supplier relationships' needs to be removed because it simply doesn't make sense. I mean seriously, lets break that sentence down logically. An application is a use of something. A methodology is a system of methods, so a project execution methodology is a system of methods for carrying out projects. So the sentence literally means 'Ways of using Six Sigma's system of methods for carrying out projects have since expanded to include practices common in TQM, such as increasing customer satisfaction and developing closer supplier relationships'. This is patent nonsense. What can it possibly mean to say that increasing customer satisfaction has become an application of a project execution methodology?

6) The final sentence, 'TQM tries to improve quality by ensuring conformance to internal requirements, while Six Sigma focuses on improving quality by reducing the number of defects and impurities', needs to be removed because it contains both a contradiction and a tautology, as I already noted. The contradiction is the claim that Six Sigma differs from TQM because TQM works by 'ensuring conformance' but Six Sigma works by 'minimising variation', when these mean the same thing. The tautology is the claim that 'Six Sigma focuses on improving quality by reducing the number of defects and impurities', since in Six Sigma 'quality' is defined in terms of the number of defects and impurities, so really the sentence says 'Six Sigma focuses on improving quality by improving quality', or 'Six Sigma focuses on reducing the number of defects and impurities by reducing the number of defects and impurities'.

With this in mind I propose a more restrained rewrite, which only removes things that are demonstrably false, tautological, or nonsense, and makes no changes to the writing style otherwise. It is below. Since the changes here are entirely CORRECTIONS to the article, and not additions, removals, or style changes, I ask that you give clear reasons not to make each individual change if you object to the change. Otherwise, I will implement the new version in a couple of days.

TQM is an integrative philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes. It is used around the world.

TQM functions on the premise that the quality of products and processes is the responsibility of everyone who is involved with the creation or consumption of the products or services offered by an organization. In other words, TQM capitalizes on the involvement of management, workforce, suppliers, and even customers, in order to meet or exceed customer expectations. Considering the practices of TQM as discussed in six empirical studies, Cua, McKone, and Schroeder (2001) identified the nine common TQM practices as cross-functional product design, process management, supplier quality management, customer involvement, information and feedback, committed leadership, strategic planning, cross-functional training, and employee involvement.

== TQM and Six Sigma ==

The Six Sigma management strategy originated in 1986 from Motorola’s drive towards reducing defects by minimizing variation in processes.

The main difference between TQM and Six Sigma (a newer concept) is the approach.