Total Quality Management Essay

Total Quality Management (TQM) is defined as the management of an entire organization so that it succeeds in all aspects of products and services that it delivers to its customers and are important to them (Francis, 2009). TQM is a management style that organizations adopt in order to improve competitiveness and organizational performance. As TQM is a management approach and it deals with the common values and beliefs of all the people in the organization, an understanding of the organizations culture and the work environment is very important for the implementation of TQM.

The concept of quality has existed for many years, though its meaning has changed and evolved over time. During the twentieth century, quality management referred to meeting the needs of the specifications. After World War 2, quality management took a more statistical definition of quality charts being established and carefully monitoring the processes. The meaning of quality changed drastically in the late 1970s where many US industries lost market share to foreign competition and in order to survive, the companies started to make major changes in their quality programs. And since 1970s competition based on quality started to take importance and companies in every line of business are focusing on improving quality in order to be more competitive.

TQM became famous by Deming in the 1950s were his proposal was based on 14 principles that stressed on the importance that managers have in the process of improving organizational performance while enhancing the capabilities of the employees (). Some of these principles include establishment of the consistency of purpose, benchmarking, building and enhancing trust, job security, team work, training and development o...

... middle of paper ...

...d supplier relationship, and measures customer satisfaction periodically. Not only this, TQM yields to continuous improvement of processes and procedures in order to ensure competitive edge in product quality, cost, and delivery. TQM further eliminates quality inspectors by transferring responsibility of quality to workers on the line. This results in implementing statistical process control at all levels, stopping the line immediately to execute corrective actions, using quality tools to analyze problems, and continuously measuring quality indices. Although TQM sometimes fails due to reasons such as lack of genuine quality culture, lack of top management support and commitment, and over-and-under-reliance on statistical process control (SPC) methods, TQM is a very reliable tool that companies implement in order to gain competitive advantage and become successful.