Total Quality Management

Total quality Management, can be defined as ensuring all departments within any company is focused on achieving customers needs and organisational objectives, ensuring continuous improvement of all organisational processes, including employee participation, teamwork and leadership. If we break down total quality management even further total can be defined as: involving all, elements, participants, and resources with in the Company. While quality is producing or providing products or services of high quality, meeting customer requirements. And finally management must ensure quality is achieved and managed. With out full management co-operation, total quality management will never be successful. For any company to be successful the customer or suppliers whether they are external or internal for example a work colleague, satisfaction must always be seen as the first priority. To enable this, high quality products and continuous improvements in processes must be produced to maintain a loyal customer base. Any company wishing to achieve success must establish a quality management system, which in turn will produce quality products and services, rather than just identify flawed products or services. With a quality management system it helps any company to achieve its goals and objectives by providing consistency and satisfaction in terms of processes, resources, and equipment and collaborates with all actions of the company. With a good quality system in place, it will reduce waste, lower costs, involve employees, raise moral and meet customer expectations. For a quality system to not function correctly will be down to poor leadership from managers by not giving a clear direction, departments not working together or accepting ...

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...ment total quality management, tools and techniques are required. The tools being Pareto analysis, cause and effects diagrams, stratification, check sheets, histograms, scatter charts and process control charts, with examples of techniques being bench marking, cost of quality, quality function deployment, failure mode effects analysis and design of experiments. After using these tools and techniques, any company will need to establish whether there has been a degree of improvement, to deal with this they must utilize self-assessments or conduct regular audits.

In conclusion total quality management is a management system used to continually improve all areas of company operations. If companies adopt any of the total quality management guru?s theories, , or even the lean principles, they will enhance the company, its workforce but most importantly its customers.