Total Quality Management (TQM)
- TQM is a continuous improvement process which involves all the employees from top to bottom in improving quality of products and services to increase customer satisfaction and meet regulatory standards.
- TQM is a systematic approach to manage organizational quality.
- It concentrates on the quality of products and services delivering to the customer.
- Quality is generally referred to a parameter which decides the inferiority and superiority of a product or service and it can be measured in terms of durability, reliability, usage and so on.
- TQM was developed jointly by WILLIAM EDWARDS DEMING, Armand V. Feigenbaum and Joseph M. Juran.
8 Principles of TQM
(1)- Customer Focus: Focus on the customer's requirements as they only determine the quality of your products. If it fulfils all the requirements than expected then only they will buy your products next time.
(2)- Employee Involvement: Motivating and empowering all the employees to achieve their goals in an organization.
(3)- Process Approach: A product or services reaches the customer after passing through different processes. It means it is monitored and assessed at each production level. So proper steps must be taken at right time to ensure consistency and speed up production.
(4)- Integrated System: A company has 2 types of integration system, horizontal and vertical. However, TQM focuses on horizontal integration. In an integrated system, everybody in every department should have a thorough understanding of policies, standards, objectives, and processes. Integrated systems help the company to look for continual improvement in order to achieve an edge over the competition.
(5)- Strategic and Systematic Flow: Quality of products and services can be achieved by strategic and systematic planning.
(6)- Continual Improvement: By continuous effort in improving quality can give high quality of products and services.
(7)- Fact Based Decision Making: In order to know how well an organization is performing, performance data are necessary. Continuously collect and analyze the data to improve the decision making accuracy.
(8)- Communications: As communication plays a vital role in any organization, so every employees need to be aware of plans, strategies and methods that will be used to achieve TQM.
Benefits of TQM
- Enhanced quality in business organizations.
- Improving productivity of an organization.
- It reduces total quality costs and increases profitability.
- It works on zero defects.
- It improves organizational culture.
- It increases customer satisfaction by meeting their expectations.
- Continuously improving quality of products and services.
- It brings changes in the attitude of employees as they feel more responsible for delivering high quality of products and services.
