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Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs.

Definition

As defined by the Deming Prize Committee of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE):

"TQM is a set of systematic activities carried out by the entire organization to effectively and efficiently achieve company objectives so as to provide products and services with a level of quality that satisfies customers, at the appropriate time and price."

In Japanese, TQM comprises of four process steps, namely:

1. Kaizen – Focuses on Continuous Process Improvement, to make processes visible, repeatable and measureable.
2. Atarimae Hinshitsu – Focuses on intangible effects on processes and ways to optimize and reduce their effects.
3. Kansei – Examining the way the user applies the product leads to improvement in the product itself.
4. Miryokuteki Hinshisu – Broadens management concern beyond the immediate product.

John Stark Associates, a consulting firm, defines TQM a company-wide culture and organization that focuses on satisfying the needs of their customers through utilizing a standard much higher than most competitors. The principle requires that the company maintains this quality standard in all aspects of its business. This requires ensuring that things are done right the first time and that defects and waste are eliminated from operations.

Origins

"Total Quality Management was developed in the mid 1940s by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who at the time was an advisor in sampling at the Bureau of Census and later became a professor of statistics at the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration."

In 1984, the United States Department of the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center began researching the use of statistical process control (SPC), Ishikawa's Total Quality Control (TQC) and quality management methods for potential benefit in making performance improvements. This work included a detailed examination of the quality management approaches advocated by Philip B. Crosby, W. Edwards Deming, and Joseph Juran.

The result was an approach that combined SPC principles with the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming. This approach was first tested at the North Island Naval Aviation Depot.

Some say the name “Total Quality Management” (TQM) was first used by the Department of the Navy in 1985 when they were starting to introduce the methods that had been successful in the North Island test to other Naval installations. The word "control" in Ishikawa's TQC wasn't good enough and was replace by "management". Xu stated in his paper, "The Making of TQM: History and Margins of the Hi(gh)-Story" from 1994, that "Total Quality Control" is translated wrong from Japanese since there is no difference between the words "control" and "management" in Japanese. William Golimski refers to Koji Kobayashi, former CEO at NEC, being the first to use TQM, which he did during a speech when he got the Deming prize in 1974.

TQM in manufacturing

Quality assurance through statistical methods is a key component in a manufacturing organization, where TQM generally starts by sampling a random selection of the product. The sample can then be tested for things that matter most to the end users. The causes of any failures are isolated, secondary measures of the production process are designed, and then the causes of the failure are corrected. The statistical distributions of important measurements are tracked. When parts' measures drift into a defined "error band", the process is fixed. The error band is usually a tighter distribution than the "failure band", so that the production process is fixed before failing parts can be produced.

It is important to record not just the measurement ranges, but what failures caused them to be chosen. In that way, cheaper fixes can be substituted later (say, when the product is redesigned) with no loss of quality. After TQM has been in use, it's very common for parts to be redesigned so that critical measurements either cease to exist, or become much wider.

It took people a while to develop tests to find emergent problems. One popular test is a "life test" in which the sample product is operated until a part fails. Another popular test is called "shake and bake", in which the product is mounted on a vibrator in an environmental oven, and operated at progressively more extreme vibration and temperatures until something fails. The failure is then isolated and engineers design an improvement.

A commonly-discovered failure is for the product to disintegrate. If fasteners fail, the improvements might be to use measured-tension nutdrivers to ensure that screws don't come off, or improved adhesives to ensure that parts remain glued.

If a gearbox wears out first, a typical engineering design improvement might be to substitute a brushless stepper motor for a DC motor with a gearbox. The improvement is that a stepper motor has no brushes or gears to wear out, so it lasts ten times or more longer. The stepper motor is more expensive than a DC motor, but cheaper than a DC motor combined with a gearbox. The electronics is radically different, but equally expensive. One disadvantage might be that a stepper motor can hum or whine, and usually needs noise-isolating mounts.

Often, a "TQMed" product is cheaper to produce because of efficiency/performance improvements and because there's no need to repair dead-on-arrival products, which represents an immensely more desirable product.

See also

• Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA)
• European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM),
• Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE),
• Management models and Business models,
• Process improvement
• Reengineering
• Six Sigma
• Statistical process control

• Hawthorne effect
• ISO 9000

References

• Bergman, Bo & Klefsjö,Bengt, Kvalitet - från behov till användning, ISBN 91-44-01917-3, Studentlitteratur: Sweden, Lund,2001.
• "A Few Words about TQM" by John Stark, John Stark Associates, retrieved December 5, 2005.

External links

• Practicing Continuous Improvement in the Classroom – paper by Sid Sytsma, Professor of Statistics and Quantitative Methods College of Business – Ferris State University
• Total Quality Management in Libraries

• Quality
• Theory of constraints
• Production and manufacturing
• Product management