Tqm
Essay by 24 • May 23, 2011 • 2,525 Words (11 Pages) • 1,165 Views
Total Quality Management may be defined as a structured system designed for the purpose of satisfying internal and external customers and suppliers by the integration of the business environment, continuous improvement, and successes in breakthroughs with the development, the improvement and the maintenance cycles and in the process changing the culture of the organization. (TQM: Definition of Total Quality Management).
Total Quality Management was the brainchild of Dr. W Edward Deming, who developed it in the mid 1940's. His ideas were not acceptable to the American businessmen, but did meet with success with the Japanese businessmen. On the cessation of hostilities connected with the Second World War, Gen MacArthur took a team of scientists and specialists to Japan and Dr. Deming happened to be one of them. Many of the businessmen attended a lecture of Dr. Deming on the means to achieve quality at reduced costs with the help of statistics. These theories of Dr Deming were later adopted by the Japanese manufacturing companies and succeeded in producing quality products at reduced costs. By the 1970s and 1980s several American companies including Ford, IBM and Xerox started using the principles of Total Quality Management as developed by Dr Deming in an attempt to regain some of the markets they had lost the Japanese and met with success. This led to the prominence of Total Quality Management in the private sectors, which has gradually now crept into the public sector too. (Total Quality Management. History of TQM).
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The use of the principles of Total Quality Management came into Asia by the Japanese businessmen utilizing it to develop quality products at lower cost and gain markets around the world, which was the envy of the developed Western world. The name of the Japanese Ishikawa became known around the world for the successful development and integration of Total Quality Management and from those days it has been considered by many that Total Quality Management was behind the success of the Japanese business.
This led to the acceptance of the Japanese versions of Total Quality Management not only in the US and the Americas but also in Europe with several of the Japanese models adopted there. The spread of Total Quality Management in Asia took place along as massive Japanese investments flowed into countries like Thailand and Singapore and thus became popular in the countries of massive Japanese investment. (Total Quality Management in Asia. Total Quality Management). The growth of TQM in the USA was encouraged through the "Baldridge Award" and in Europe by the European Quality Award. The principle elements that in use by those practicing Total Quality Management can be seen in the principles that are utilized for auditing the companies. (TQM in practice).
The key principles involved in Total Quality management may taken as the commitment of the Management to plan, deploy, monitor and execute necessary measures such as the training of employees for employee empowerment along with providing them the means to make suggestions and a to measure their productivity and provide the necessary recognition and create teams of excellence with suitable employees. Decisions are to be made based on a statistical process control and making use of DOE and FMEA and the seven statistical tools and finally TOPS (Ford 8D - Team Oriented Problem Solving). The Management needs to strive for Continuous Improvement by the systematic measurement and concentration on CONQ, teams of excellence, cross-functional process management, and attain maintain and improve the standards set. There should be a focus on the Customer by a supplier partnership, service relationship with internal customers, without any compromise on quality, and standards that are set to customer requirements. One of the core concerns of Total Quality management is the continuous improvement in all areas of work be it at the highest level in strategic planning and decision making, to the detailed execution of the elements of work at the shop floor level.
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This is because there is the belief that errors can be avoided and defects prevented from occurring. This leads to continued results that show improvement in every aspect of work as a result of the improving levels of capabilities, employees, processes, technology and capabilities of the machines. It is not enough that continuous improvement brings about improved results but more importantly improve the capabilities to give better results in the days ahead. There are five important areas of concentration for the improvement of capabilities and these are demand generation, supply generation, technology, operations and people's capability. One of the core principles of Total Quality Management is that people are likely to make mistakes but most of these happen or are let to happen because of faulty systems and processes. This in short means that the rot cause of these mistakes can be found out and removed and changing the process involved can eliminate the further occurrence of such events. (Introduction and Implementation of Total Quality Management (TQM)).
Employee empowerment as a part of Total Quality Management has several requirements as prescribed by Deming. It was the view of Deming that instead of leading any enterprise management spent more time in exercising control and thus worrying too much about results. Concentration on efforts to improvements by making the company visions the actual actions of the company. Business leaders should be concentrating their efforts in identifying the source of any problems and taking steps to correct it instead of looking for individual deficiencies to blame the inefficiencies on. In righting such wrongs a horizontal focus happens between all employees, as managers would look for advice from all sources and give equal weight-age to all these opinions. This would lead to the focus of management on the larger picture rather than concentrate on minute details thus saving time and money in the long run. Fear is an inherent part of every individual and the removal of this fear permits ideas to float around the organization. This does not mean it will disappear completely from the organization, since higher management is involved in the career advancement and salaries of the employees. This is also am important
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