Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management is an approach to the art of management that was largely credited to the work of W Edwards Deming. It was adapted by the Japanese in the late 1940s and early 1950s and revolutionized the quality standards of manufactured products from Japanese industries. Over the past two decades it has been adopted by the west and is becoming more popular with managers in multiple fields of business as it pertains to the overall quality of the product and the satisfaction of the customer.

Total Quality is a description of the culture, attitude and organization of a company that aims to provide, and continue to provide, its customers with products and services that satisfy their needs. The culture requires quality in all aspects of the company's operations, with things being done right first time, and defects and waste eradicated from operations.

TQM has a customer-first orientation. The customer, not internal activities and constraints, comes first. Customer satisfaction is seen as the company's highest priority. The TQM company is sensitive to customer requirements and responds rapidly to them. In the TQM context, `being sensitive to customer requirements' goes beyond defect and error reduction, and merely meeting specifications or reducing customer complaints. The concept of requirements is expanded to take in not only product and service attributes that meet basic requirements, but also those that enhance and differentiate them for competitive advantage.

Globalization has had a major impact on quality. For many years a product that was made in Japan was considered to be sub par by American standards. Products that were shipped into the United States were considerably cheaper as far as cost and more often than not of very poor quality. American products garnered a considerably larger price than its foreign counterparts but eventually began to slip in quality as foreign countries implemented quality management practices.

Prior to the 1970's, the United States consumer was offered superior products manufactured domestically and knock off products from the foreign distributors. By