Total Quality Management (TQM): A Quick Guide

Total Quality Management (TQM): A Quick Guide

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management approach that focuses on delivering products and services with the highest quality to maximize customer satisfaction and meet regulatory standards. It is an organization-wide effort for continuous improvement, which is defined as an employee's ability to provide on-demand products and services that are of value to their customers. TQM has no widely agreed-upon approach, but it does draw from other tools and techniques, such as project quality control, quality assurance and testing, and others. The most important TQM principles are summarized below. Total Quality Management (TQM) is a process-oriented approach that focuses on customer satisfaction.

It involves total employee involvement, process thinking, integrated system, strategic and systemic approach, continuous improvement, fact-based decision making, data collection and analysis, and communications. It is essential to maintain a successful TQM approach without an effective communication plan.
Total quality management is a methodology used to manage quality in a project. Communication plans make sure that every department is aware of what they and others are responsible for, while lean manufacturing is a type of lean projection that comes from Japan. Six Sigma is another quality management methodology that focuses on improving current processes, products or services. ISO 9000 is a set of international standards focused on quality management and quality assurance. The roots of total quality management can be traced back to the economic instability of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the dominance of North America and Western Europe was challenged by competition from the East.

The term was inspired by the book Total Quality Control by quality control expert and businessman Armand V. Feigenbaum and What Is Total Quality Country? The Japanese Way by the organizational theorist Kaoru Ishikawa.