Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, call centers, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs.

Definition
TQM is composed of three paradigms:
• Total: Involving the entire organization, supply chain, and/or product life cycle
• Quality: With its usual Definitions, with all its complexities (External Definition)
• Management: The system of managing with steps like Plan, Organize, Control, Lead, Staff, provisioning and the likes[citation needed].
As defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO):
"TQM is a management approach for an organization, centered on quality, based on the participation of all its members and aiming at long-term success through customer satisfaction, and benefits to all members of the organization and to society." ISO 8402:1994[citation needed]
One major aim is to reduce variation from every process so that greater consistency of effort is obtained. (Royse, D., Thyer, B., Padgett D., & Logan T., 2006)

In Japan, TQM comprises four process steps, namely:
1. Kaizen – Focuses on "Continuous Process Improvement", to make processes visible, repeatable and measurable.
2. Atarimae Hinshitsu – The idea that "things will work as they are supposed to" (for example, a pen will write).
3. Kansei – Examining the way the user applies the product leads to improvement in the product itself.
4. Miryokuteki Hinshitsu – The idea that "things should have an aesthetic quality" (for example, a pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer).[citation needed]

TQM requires that the company maintain this quality standard in all aspects of its business. This requires ensuring that things are done right the first time and that defects and waste are eliminated from operations.[citation needed]

A Comprehensive Definition
TQM Total Quality Management is the organization wide management of quality. We know that management consists of planning, organizing, directing, control, and assurance. Then, one has to define "total quality". Total quality is called total because it consists of 3 qualities: Quality of return to satisfy the needs of the shareholders, Quality of products TQM Article: http://www.betsa.ir/Cat/21.aspx

Origins
"Total Quality Control" was the key concept of Armand Feigenbaum's 1951 book, Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration, in a chapter titled "Total Quality Control" Feigenbaum grabs on to an idea that sparked many scholars interest in the following decades, that would later be catapulted from Total Quality Control to Total Quality Management. W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Philip B. Crosby, and Kaoru Ishikawa, known as the big four, also contributed to the body of knowledge now known as Total Quality Management.

The American Society for Quality says that the term Total Quality Management was used by the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command "to describe its Japanese-style management approach to quality improvement."[2] This is consistent with the story that the United States Navy Personnel Research and Development Center began researching the use of statistical process control (SPC); the work of Juran, Crosby, and Ishikawa; and the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming to make performance improvements in 1984. This approach was first tested at the North Island Naval Aviation Depot.

TQM in manufacturing
Quality assurance through statistical methods is a key component in a manufacturing organization, where TQM generally starts by sampling a random selection of the product. The sample can then be tested for things that matter most to the end users. The causes of any failures are isolated, secondary measures of the production process are designed, and then the causes of the failure are corrected. The statistical distributions of important measurements are tracked. When parts' measures drift into a defined "error band", the process is fixed. The error band has usually a tighter distribution than the "failure band", so that the production process is fixed before failing parts can be produced.

It is important to record not just the measurement ranges, but what failures caused them to be chosen. In that way, cheaper fixes can be substituted later (say, when the product is redesigned) with no loss of quality. After TQM has been in use, it's very common for parts to be redesigned so that critical measurements either cease to exist, or become much wider.

It took people a while to develop tests to find emergent problems. One popular test is a "life test" in which the sample product is operated until a part fails. Another popular test is called "shake and bake", in which the product is mounted on a vibrator in an environmental oven, and operated at progressively more extreme vibration and temperatures until something fails. The failure is then isolated and engineers design an improvement.
A commonly-discovered failure is for the product to disintegrate. If fasteners fail, the improvements might be to use measured-tension nutdrivers to ensure that screws don't come off, or improved adhesives to ensure that parts remain glued.
If a gearbox wears out first, a typical engineering design improvement might be to substitute a brushless stepper motor for a DC motor with a gearbox.

TQM and contingency-based research
TQM has not been independent of its environment. In the context of management accounting systems (MCSs), Sim and Killough (1998) show that incentive pay enhanced the positive effects of TQM on customer and quality performance. Ittner and Larcker (1995) demonstrated that product focused TQM was linked to timely problem solving information and flexible revisions to reward systems. Chendall (2003) summarizes the findings from contingency-based research concerning management control systems and TQM by noting that “TQM is associated with broadly based MCSs including timely, flexible, externally focused information; close interactions between advanced technologies and strategy; and non-financial performance measurement.” (p.143)tqm its kind of process

TQM, just another Management fad
Abrahamson (1996) argued that fashionable management discourse such as Quality Circles tends to follow a lifecycle in the form of a bell curve. Ponzi and Koenig (2002) showed that the same can be said about TQM, which peaked between 1992 and 1996, while rapidly losing popularity in terms of citations after these years. Dubois (2002) argued that the use of the term TQM in management discourse created a positive utility regardless of what managers meant by it (which showed a large variation), while in the late 1990s the usage of the term TQM in implementation of reforms lost the positive utility attached to the mere fact of using the term and sometimes associations with TQM became even negative (Wilkinson et al 1998). Nevertheless, management concepts such as TQM leave their traces, as their core ideas can be very valuable (Hill and Wilkinson 1995). For example, Dubois (2002) showed that the core ideas behind the two management fads Reengineering and TQM, without explicit usage of their names, can work in a synergistic way.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Quality_Management