Total Quality Management

Described by my roommate as "A method by which you know, in detail, why you are going out of business".

Quality by Definition

Elements of Quality

How important is quality is to your company? You see the results of it, or the lack of it, every time you have a satisfied customer, or when your competitors market share increases. Unfortunately, though the concept is the rage, is hard for some to define.

We will use a minimum of jargon, and try to meld the various viewpoints of gurus and philosophies into a clearer single picture.

Among the elements of TQM are:

Focus on Quality and Prevention of Problems

What is quality? It can be viewed as consistently producing what the customer wants while reducing errors before and after delivery to the customer. More importantly, however, quality is not so much an outcome as a never ending process of continually improving the quality of what your company, organization or family produces.

TQM emphasizes detecting potential problems before they occur. A defect for this definition can be an imperfect product or one that just doesn't live up to customer expectation. Failure to prevent defects has several consequences:

The need to inspect other people's finished work, rather than relying on the worker's own motivation and skill. This inspection requires extra people and resources. If another employee (a supervisor or perhaps a "checker") finds errors, someone must fix the error, causing extra time and workload, or scrap it with all the accompanying waste; if customers find the errors, this can cause dissatisfaction, loss of customer confidence, and perhaps loss of customers themselves. A "customer" can be defined as anyone who you interact with that has reasonable expectation pertaining to your performance or product. So, conversely, this could be your boss, employee, customer or coworker.

Not only should products or services be inspected while they are made; to be successful in preventing defects, companies must design in quality before they provide a product or service. During the design phase of product or service development, input from customers, marketing, and those and assemble or produce the final product is vital.

Cooperate with your Suppliers and Customers

Another element of TQM emphasizes cooperating with suppliers of products and services to the organization, and a focus on customer satisfaction.

Many organizations treat suppliers with indifference, and often with hostility. Instead of having many potential suppliers, each competing to give the organization the cheapest price, TQM emphasizes a different relationship. In an organization that implements TQM, vendors are treated as business partners, with all parties working to deliver a quality product. Companies choose suppliers based on consistently delivering a quality product or service. This means that for an organization to succeed, its suppliers must implement TQM as well. A key philosophy in dealing with customers is that it is they who define what quality is.

In organizations implementing TQM, customers and suppliers include relations inside the organization. End Users can be considered the customer of IT; Employees can be the customers of Employers. The "products" departments produce for other departments must satisfy the quality requirements of their internal customers.

Continuously Improve and Eliminate Wasteful steps

Quality is a moving target as well. Cars that consumers believed reliable in the past are now of average quality. What is now a rare feature produced only by you will soon become commonplace and expected. To meet dynamic customer needs, the organization itself must be dynamic.

One caution exists, however, in eliminating wasteful steps: It can mean the elimination of positions or whole classes of work. Employees may receive this and actively resist against such moves.

Encourage the Proper Climate, Empower Employees

For continuous improvement to work, management must empower employees, so they are willing to innovate and act in an atmosphere of trust and respect. All of the other components can be in place, and TQM still fail. Employees motivated to improve service to their customers with the climate and training allowing them to do so is a powerful combination.

Use the problem solving/problem prevention cycle

This cycle, describes the steps that TQM problem solving/prevention groups use. It's major elements are 1) the gathering of information and its analysis before actions are taken; the use of brainstorming (creating possible solutions) before evaluating ideas generated; and 3) evaluation of success. This cycle, using different terminology, is also called the Deming cycle, where its components are PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, and Act). This cycle can be used in:

cross-functional teams, to clarify and refine processes that cross organizational boundaries; design teams, to create or change organization-wide systems; intact family work groups working to improve their day-to-day operations; and newly formed and intact work groups to improve their interpersonal functioning.

Use Measurements to Back Decisions

Manage with facts. The key to success is to deliver consistently services your customer's need. To find out whether we are successful, we ask our customers how well we are doing. In TQM, this data can be graphed. With this data, trained employees (including management) can use it:

to spot trends, and correct these trends before problems are caused; as part of problem solving, to find out why the problem occurred, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. These graphs are the tools of StatisticalProcessControl (SPC); and in product design. The use of experiments at this stage of product development can identify key characteristics that can affect and optimize product or service development. These products may be specific services useful to a customer, or manufactured equipment or materials.

When an organization uses statistics to make decisions, they can avoid making knee-jerk reactions to small, random changes in outcome. Statistics allow the decision-maker to tell the difference between chance occurrences and systematic factors that significantly affect product or service quality.

If your reaction to this article is, "Wait a minute. All of these concepts are just good business sense!" you are right.

 BillEbert

CategoryQuality, CategoryEnterpriseComputingConcerns