Tottal Quality Management

Although it seems to be a familiar old term, Total Quality Management (TQM) is a relatively new concept in the United States (US). Although it is a familiar phase to most people in business, it is one that most people cannot accurately define. In this paper, I will be discussing the concepts and origins of TQM and how it compared to different forms of management.

Total Quality Management has only been in the United States since the 1980's however, it has been around much longer. After the end of World War II, the Japanese were looking to boost their sluggish economy as well as to lose their reputation for poor quality products that they had gotten on the world market. Many Japanese companies began to look into a new concept called Total Quality Management. TQM focuses on getting all of the employees of a company to work as a single unit and removing the focus from individuals and placing it onto the process. If a product is produced with flaws, there is never a search for who is to blame for those flaws because it was the failure of the entire company not just an individual. All of these thought processes helped Japanese companies to begin to produce some of the highest quality products anywhere in the world.

TQM is looked upon by many Americans as the "Japanese way" of doing business but in the 1980's people began to realize that the Japanese imports were beginning to sell more than the US made versions due to the higher quality of the Japanese products. Prior to globalization becoming easier, quality of products is less of an issue for companies because the consumer doesn't have the ability to get better quality products from somewhere else. Now that more products where coming in from other countries that were of higher quality and a lower cost, many consumers loyalties switched to imports. This started a trend of US companies studying how the Japanese were running their organizations and many companies began