About total quality management (TQM)

This is an umbrella term to describe both a philosophy about quality in the organisation and also a family of tools and approaches which can enable and sustain it. Its origins lie in the work of scientists and engineers working in the USA in the 1920s where a variety of statistical tools were developed to help manage quality in the emerging mass production industries. Whilst these tools could help identify where and what to sample to ensure a good chance of stopping defective products leaving the factory they did not address the underlying problems of preventing the problems occurring or systematically eliminating causes through improved product and process design.

Integrated approaches — which laid particular emphasis on the need to involve people in the design and implementation of quality control and improvement — were refined up to and during the Second World War. These ideas were transferred to Japan under various aid programmes and found a receptive audience. In the subsequent years much of the development of thinking about quality went on in Japan rather than in the West — and its application led to a transformation of the manufacturing capability of the country. One powerful indicator was that by the 1980s Japanese firms in a variety of sectors were able to measure their quality defects in terms of a small number of parts per million — at a time when Western firms were still quoting percentage defects!

The 'secret' of Japanese success was the systematic application of ideas originated in the West about managing the total quality system and especially about ensuring high levels of employee involvement. Much of the development work on how this could be implemented — through policy deployment, team working, employee involvement in quality circles and kaizen activities, etc. — was carried out by Japanese firms and the ideas became classed as an approach termed' company wide quality control'. This integrated model was effectively re-exported to the West where it became known as total quality management.

A full discussion of the history of TQM can be found in Brown et al, 2000, Strategic Operations Management, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford.

TQM can be seen as a mixture of:

• quality culture — ensuring people understand and act to build quality in, to 'get it right first time' to take responsibility for fixing problems at source rather than passing them on, etc.
• quality strategy — a clear direction for quality improvement and sustainability, accompanied by measures and effective policy deployment
• quality improvement — effectively making use of all the capabilities within the organisation to review and strive for continuous improvement in quality
• quality tools — which help support the above activities.

The table below links to the many resources in this toolbox which apply to TQM.