What Is Total Quality Management

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What is Total Quality management?

Total quality management (TQM) describes a management system wherein a company attains
organizational advancement through a commitment to customer requirements. A company meets those
requirements when it empowers every employee in every department to maintain high standards and
strive for continuous improvement.

What is Quality Management?

“the application of a quality management system in managing a process to achieve maximum customer
satisfaction at the lowest overall cost to the organization while continuing to improve the process.”

Total Quality Management Principles

Customer Satisfaction: Ensuring that products or services consistently meet or exceed customer
expectations.

Employee Commitment: Empowering employees through training and suggestion mechanisms to foster
a sense of ownership and dedication.

Fact-Based Decision Making: Utilizing data and statistical analysis to inform decisions and ensure work
meets specified standards.

Effective Communications: Promoting open dialogue throughout the organization to facilitate clear and
efficient information exchange.

Strategic Thinking: Integrating quality into the long-term vision of the organization to align goals and
objectives.

Integrated System: Connecting everyone in the company, including suppliers, through a shared vision
and commitment to quality principles.

Process-Centered: Breaking down every activity into processes, allowing for the identification and
replication of the most effective processes.

Continuous Improvement: Encouraging every employee to consistently seek ways to enhance and
optimize their job performance.
What are the Costs of Quality?

Appraisal Costs: Appraisal costs cover inspection and testing throughout the production cycle. This
includes verifying that the materials received from the supplier meet specifications and ensuring that
products are acceptable at each stage of production.

Prevention Costs: Prevention costs include proper setup of work areas for efficiency and safety, and
proper training and planning. This type of cost also includes conducting reviews. Prevention-related
activities often receive the smallest allocation of a company’s budget.

External Failure Costs: This category concerns the cost of issues following a product’s market release.
They may include warranty issues, product recalls, returns, and repairs.

Internal Failure Costs: Internal failures are the costs of problems before products reach customers.
Examples of internal failures include broken machines, which cause delay and downtime, poor materials,
scrapped product runs, and designs that require rework.

PDCA

“Plan: The planning phase is the most important. That’s where management, along with the associates,
identify the problems to see what really needs to be addressed — the day-to-day things that may be
happening on the productivity side that management is not aware of. So they’re trying to determine a
root cause. Sometimes, employees do research or high-level tracking to narrow down where an issue
may originate.

Do: The doing phase is the solution phase. Strategies are developed to try to fix those problems
identified in the planning phase. Employees may implement solutions and if a solution doesn’t appear to
work, it’s back to the drawing board. In contrast to Six Sigma, it’s less about measuring gains and more
about whether the employees judge the solution to be working.

Check: The checking phase is the before and after. So after you’ve made these changes, you see how
they’re doing.

Act: The acting phase is the presentation or the documentation of the results to let everybody know,
‘Hey, here’s how we were doing it. Here’s how it is now. This is the new way, and this is what this should
address going forward.’”
The Seven Basic Tools of Total Quality Management

Check Sheet: This is a pre-made form for gathering one type of data over time, so it’s only useful for
frequently recurring data.

Pareto Chart: The chart posits that 80 percent of problems are linked to 20 percent of causes. It helps
you identify which problems fall into which categories.

Cause and Effect Diagram or Ishikawa Diagram: This diagram allows you to visualize all possible causes
of a problem or effect and then categorize them.

Control Chart: This chart is a graphical description of how processes and results change over time.

Histogram Bar Chart: This shows the frequency of a problem’s cause, as well as how and where results
cluster.

Scatter Diagram: This diagram plots data on the x and y axes to determine how results change as the
variables change.

Flow Chart or Stratification Diagram: This represents how different factors join in a process.

5S

Sort/Seiri – Work should become easier in this kind of environment as you have no unnecessary
distractions.

Straighten/Seiton – Straighten up tools so you can easily select and use them.

Shine/Seiso – Clean the workplace at a set interval of time daily.

Standardize/Seiketsu – picking the best practices for a work area and organization.

Sustain/Shisuke – Training and discipline.

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