What is Total Quality Management(TQM)? | Akrivia HCM

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a business strategy that encourages an organization to improve all processes. It clearly defines quality and company expectations, and most importantly, it helps to measure your performance.

What is Total Quality Management (TQM)?

Total Quality Management is a management approach where a company aims to deliver maximum customer satisfaction by consistently improving the production process and quality management with the whole team’s involvement. TQM is concerned with every aspect of the business, including product innovation and development, design, sales, distribution, services, marketing, human resources, and corporate culture.

What is the objective of TQM?

The objective of Total Quality Management (TQM) is to make sure that the customer is getting total value for the service or product they are investing in it. It means that teams will be focusing on producing products or services that are superior in quality and, hence, require all-hands-on-deck.

TQM is based on the premise that customers are the most valuable assets a company has. Therefore, companies need to provide their customers with products and services that help them achieve their goals.

What are the principles of TQM?

Total Quality Management is a business idea and management methodology that focuses on improving all aspects of quality in a business. It is an approach to management implemented across many industries in the last two decades.

TQM is based on several principles:

  • Focus on customer needs.
  • Commitment from all employees.
  • Making the process efficient.
  • Integrate systems.
  • Improvement continually.
  • Adopting a strategic and systematic approach.
  • Making decisions based on facts.
  • Communicating extensively.

What are the ten elements of TQM?

Total Quality Management is made up of the following ten elements:

  • Commitment to delivering the best in quality
  • Focus on customer satisfaction
  • Preventing the existence of defects
  • Setting measurement parameters for quality
  • Actively creating corrective action plans
  • Extensive improvement
  • Acknowledging high quality
  • Training for the better
  • Involvement of everyone in the team
  • Benchmarking to attain new heights

What are the disadvantages and advantages of Total Quality Management?

Total Quality Management is a way of making their business more competitive. The concept of TQM is not new. It has been about for over 25 years, but the application or implementation has been slow.

However, when it comes to TQM, it should consider both advantages and disadvantages before implementing it in a company.

Advantages:
TQM is considered a strategic management process that “”emphasizes continual improvement across all areas of an organization”” (Crosby, 1997). With this approach, organizations can have the edge over other competitors by reaching higher levels of customer satisfaction and getting ahead of other businesses in terms of market share and profit. This strategy also helps strengthen the company’s market image by putting the team in the limelight and enhancing public presence. In addition, TQM boosts employee morale, improving job security and job satisfaction.

Disadvantages:
Total Quality Management is a management tactic that asks for many meetings and planning efforts. Bringing quality in the picture would also lead to many unplanned expensive activities, especially regarding human resource development.

What is the essential part of TQM?

The main element of TQM is the board of leadership in an organization. The board must be willing to listen to every employee and take their concerns seriously. Even if the employee suggests how to improve something, it could be beneficial to listen to them and see if there is a way to improve it.

Who are the key players in Total Quality Management?

The key players of Total Quality Management (TQM) are:

  • The Customers whom we want to impress.
  • The employees who will work on the improvement processes.
  • The suppliers will be providing higher-quality products for you to work with it.

What is an example of total quality management (TQM)?

Toyota introduced total quality management (TQM). TQM is a set of principles for controlling and improving the actual quality of a product or service.

Total means that it must consider every aspect of the product or service quality. Quality means controlling everything from design, production, packaging, and distribution to create the highest quality possible. Management indicates that there must be a system to ensure that all quality aspects are dealt with effectively and efficiently. TQM is based on two pillars as below:

1. Respect for People: It means employees are respected as individuals who are part of the company’s goal of achieving higher standards through improvement.
2. Continuous Improvement: It means continuous analysis and improvement towards bettering customer satisfaction.

With these two pillars in mind, Toyota created their system for implementing total quality management called the “”Kanban System.”” This system is based on an inventory model where parts are only produced when needed. Details do not sit idle, waiting for other factors to arrive so that they can be assembled into a final product; instead, parts flow together continuously and automatically.

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