Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a revolutionary concept in the management of quality. Foremost, it is a recognition that quality not only depends upon tangible investments in machines, processes or facilities, but also on intangibles such as the integration and management of these resources, the corporate and cultural environment, personnel motivation, etc. Thus, TQM results in a new management order, based on lateral integration, a coherent and continuous improvement of the ‘global’ performance of the firm in the short-term and in the long-term. In its end result, TQM is viewed as a total (social, organizational and operational) commitment to manage a firm’s resources to achieve the highest levels of performance in everything in which the firm is involved. This may include a vendor’s relationships, the productivity and efficiency of the manufacturing process, manufacturing yields (or reliability), services and customer satisfaction. While there is an agreement regarding the ends of TQM, there may be some confusion regarding the ‘how’. In this chapter we shall consider several approaches to TQM, each emphasizing a structured approach to integrated and total quality management (see Figure 2.1).

Keywords

• Quality Improvement

• Quality Management

• Total Quality Management

• Continuous Quality Improvement

• Quality Circle

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.