Total quality management
Take a look at the industry wide strategy, total quality management
What is total quality management (TQM)?
Total quality management is an industry wide strategy. Developed in the 1920’s, it’s aim is to achieve a consistent culture of customer satisfaction. Total quality management is a customer focused process, ensuring that the right products are made in the most efficient way, that delivers the most value.
Total quality management is made up of both quality control and quality assurance.
- Quality control:
This is about making sure the products and services are fit for purpose once they are produced or ready to deliver. - Quality assurance:
This is about ensuring things don’t go wrong throughout the process, so you can deliver the correct products and services all times.
Both aspects help organisations to produce goods that meet the required specifications, whilst focusing on ways to improve them, develop them and look at the product process.
How to make total quality management a success
For successful total quality management within your organisation, there a few things you can do to make it a success.
- Publish the aims and purposes of your organisation, so all staff can understand clearly
- Learn and adopt the right first time approach
- Understand the purpose of inspection and stop depending on inspection
- Stop awarding business based on just the price
- Practice and encourage continuous improvement
- Drive out fear, create trust and create a climate for innovation
- Optimise the efforts of teams
- Encourage education and self-improvement for everyone involved
- Make it everyone’s job to focus on quality and improvement
Advantages of total quality management
Total quality management helps you to make the best products possible for your consumers, which will help contribute to the long-term success of your organisation. Here are some of the advantages total quality management can bring to your organisation.
- Allows you to achieve a high level of customer service through consistency.
- Using high quality information to improve processes, helps to reduce waste
- Helps everyone to understand quality in the marketplace and how important it is for the customer
- As total quality management focuses on employee engagement, this can save money on training and recruiting new staff.
- Total quality management can give you a competitive advantage
Disadvantages of total quality management
Although total quality management often helps your organisation to maintain long-term success, there are some challenges that you may experience.
- TQM relies on the whole company to be committed to improvement which can be difficult to achieve
- A lot of data must be recorded, to help you track quality progress. This can often be a time-consuming activity.
- Smaller companies often find it difficult to comply with quality standards
- A lack of efforts and resources will contribute to the failure of total quality management
Total quality management key themes
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