Concept of TQM

Total Quality management is defined as a continuous effort by the management as well as

employees of a particular organization to ensure long term customer loyalty and customer
satisfaction. Remember, one happy and satisfied customer brings ten new customers along with
him whereas one disappointed individual will spread bad word of mouth and spoil several of
your existing as well as potential customers.

You need to give something extra to your customers to expect loyalty in return. Quality can be
measured in terms of durability, reliability, usage and so on. Total quality management is a
structured effort by employees to continuously improve the quality of their products and services
through proper feedbacks and research. Ensuring superior quality of a product or service is not
the responsibility of a single member.

Every individual who receives his/her paycheck from the organization has to contribute equally
to design foolproof processes and systems which would eventually ensure superior quality of
products and services. Total Quality management is indeed a joint effort of management, staff
members, workforce, suppliers in order to meet and exceed customer satisfaction level. You
can’t just blame one person for not adhering to quality measures. The responsibility lies on the
shoulder of everyone who is even remotely associated with the organization.

W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, and Armand V. Feigenbaum jointly developed the
concept of total quality management. Total Quality management originated in the manufacturing
sector, but can be applied to almost all organizations.

Total quality management ensures that every single employee is working towards the
improvement of work culture, processes, services, systems and so on to ensure long term
success.

Deming’s 14 Points on TQM

1. Create a constant purpose toward improvement.
 Plan for quality in the long term.
 Resist reacting with short-term solutions.
 Don't just do the same things better – find better things to do.
 Predict and prepare for future challenges, and always have the goal of getting
better.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
 Embrace quality throughout the organization.
 Put your customers' needs first, rather than react to competitive pressure – and
design products and services to meet those needs.
 Be prepared for a major change in the way business is done. It's about leading, not
simply managing.
  Create your quality vision, and implement it.
3. Stop depending on inspections.
 Inspections are costly and unreliable – and they don't improve quality, they
merely find a lack of quality.
 Build quality into the process from start to finish.
 Don't just find what you did wrong – eliminate the "wrongs" altogether.
 Use statistical control methods – not physical inspections alone – to prove that the
process is working.
4. Use a single supplier for any one item.
 Quality relies on consistency – the less variation you have in the input, the less
variation you'll have in the output.
 Look at suppliers as your partners in quality. Encourage them to spend time
improving their own quality – they shouldn't compete for your business based on
price alone.
 Analyze the total cost to you, not just the initial cost of the product.
 Use quality statistics to ensure that suppliers meet your quality standards.
5. Improve constantly and forever.
 Continuously improve your systems and processes. Deming promoted the Plan-
Do-Check-Act approach to process analysis and improvement
 Emphasize training and education so everyone can do their jobs better.
 Use kaizen as a model to reduce waste and to improve productivity, effectiveness,
and safety.
6. Use training on the job.
 Train for consistency to help reduce variation.
 Build a foundation of common knowledge.
 Allow workers to understand their roles in the "big picture."
 Encourage staff to learn from one another, and provide a culture and environment
for effective teamwork.
7. Implement leadership.
 Expect your supervisors and managers to understand their workers and the
processes they use.
 Don't simply supervise – provide support and resources so that each staff member
can do his or her best. Be a coach instead of a policeman.
 Figure out what each person actually needs to do his or her best.
 Emphasize the importance of participative management and transformational
leadership.
 Find ways to reach full potential, and don't just focus on meeting targets and
quotas.
8. Eliminate fear.
 Allow people to perform at their best by ensuring that they're not afraid to express
ideas or concerns.
 Let everyone know that the goal is to achieve high quality by doing more things
right – and that you're not interested in blaming people when mistakes happen.
 Make workers feel valued, and encourage them to look for better ways to do
things.
  Ensure that your leaders are approachable and that they work with teams to act in
the company's best interests.
 Use open and honest communication to remove fear from the organization.
9. Break down barriers between departments.
 Build the "internal customer" concept – recognize that each department or
function serves other departments that use their output.
 Build a shared vision.
 Use cross-functional teamwork to build understanding and reduce adversarial
relationships.
 Focus on collaboration and consensus instead of compromise.
10. Get rid of unclear slogans.
 Let people know exactly what you want – don't make them guess. "Excellence in
service" is short and memorable, but what does it mean? How is it achieved? The
message is clearer in a slogan like "You can do better if you try."
 Don't let words and nice-sounding phrases replace effective leadership. Outline
your expectations, and then praise people face-to-face for doing good work.
11. Eliminate management by objectives.
 Look at how the process is carried out, not just numerical targets. Deming said
that production targets encourage high output and low quality.
 Provide support and resources so that production levels and quality are high and
achievable.
 Measure the process rather than the people behind the process.

1. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship.

 Allow everyone to take pride in their work without being rated or compared.
 Treat workers the same, and don't make them compete with other workers for
monetary or other rewards. Over time, the quality system will naturally raise the
level of everyone's work to an equally high level.
2. Implement education and self-improvement.
 Improve the current skills of workers.
 Encourage people to learn new skills to prepare for future changes and challenges
 Build skills to make your workforce more adaptable to change, and better able to
find and achieve improvements.
3. Make "transformation" everyone's job.

 Improve your overall organization by having each person take a step toward quality.
 Analyze each small step, and understand how it fits into the larger picture.
 Use effective change management principles to introduce the new philosophy and ideas
in Deming's 14 points.
Deming Wheel
PDCA ( Plan Do Check and Act), sometimes called the "Deming Wheel," "Deming Cycle," or
PDSA was developed by renowned management consultant Dr William Edwards Deming in the
1950s. Deming himself called it the "Shewhart Cycle," as his model was based on an idea from
his mentor, Walter Shewhart.

Deming wanted to create a way of identifying what caused products to fail to meet customers'
expectations. His solution helps businesses to develop hypotheses about what needs to change,
and then test these in a continuous feedback loop.
Planning Phase

Planning is the most crucial phase of total quality management. In this phase employees have to
come up with their problems and queries which need to be addressed. They need to come up with
the various challenges they face in their day to day operations and also analyze the problem’s
root cause. Employees are required to do necessary research and collect relevant data which
would help them find solutions to all the problems.

Doing Phase

In the doing phase, employees develop a solution for the problems defined in planning phase.
Strategies are devised and implemented to overcome the challenges faced by employees. The
effectiveness of solutions and strategies is also measured in this stage.

Checking Phase

Checking phase is the stage where people actually do a comparison analysis of before and after
data to confirm the effectiveness of the processes and measure the results.

Acting Phase

In this phase employees document their results and prepare themselves to address other
problems.

Note that the Deming Cycle is an iterative process, so after ACT, we return back to PLAN.
Over time, we will achieve Continuous Improvement in quality. Each time we renew the cycle,
our organization is at a higher point of quality. Executing the cycle again will extend our
knowledge further.