Total Quality Management Essay Research Paper Today

Total Quality Management Essay, Research Paper

Today s marketplace is changing at a rapid pace, with new technologies, increased competition, more governmental regulation, a changing workforce and new customer requirements. To survive in the face of these and other challenges, many companies are working hard to reduce costs, downsize, reorganize, and improve service and customer satisfaction. Total quality management is an important competitive weapon, and is a way of managing the whole organization to ensure complete customer satisfaction at every stage, both internally and externally.

TQM is an approach to improving the effectiveness and flexibility of a business as a whole. It is a quality process involving every person in every department of an organization, working together to eliminate errors and prevent wastage in any form. The benefits of making sure that things are done right the first time are enormous in terms of greater efficiencies, lower costs, improved quality, and a better reputation (Hansen, Total 4).

TQM is a management philosophy, based upon a set of principles, and supported by a set of proven methodologies and tools (Dean, Total 2). These principles include:

h Focusing the organization on satisfying customers needs.

h Developing and bringing out the full human potential of all employees.

h Involving everyone in efforts to find better ways out of difficulties or problems.

h Managing business processes, not just functions or departments.

h Managing by fact, using reliable data and information.

h Adding value to society, as well as achieving financial goals.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming successfully used the idea of an integrated, human oriented systems approach to management in the 1950 s. Deming told the Japanese that they could become world-class leaders if they followed his advice. He lectured top Japanese business leaders methods for management of quality and proposed a system that would change the approach to management in many ways. During the 1970 s and 1980 s, the Japanese and their U.S companies demonstrated that high quality is achievable at lower costs and greater customer satisfaction. It was the result of using the management principles of total quality management. Today that system is the pillar of TQM philosophy (Ravichandran, Quality 19).

Dr. Deming s book, In Out of Crisis, outlines his fourteen points for management. He understood that a manager of people needs to comprehend that all individuals are different. Below we can see what Dr. Deming taught in his style of management. Deming s fourteen points of management are as follows (Deming, 1986):

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

4. Minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease cost.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in sales, research, design and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans and targets for the work force asking for zero defects. Such sayings only create adversarial relationships thus promoting pressure and low quality results.

11. Eliminate work standards and substitute it with leadership. Eliminate management by objective and substitute it with leadership.

12. Remove barriers such as merit ratings that rob hourly workers and management workers of their right to have pride in their work.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish a transformation. The transformation should include all level of workers and their unlimited effort.

Deming (1986) built a case for treating the organization as a total system and credited the differences in observed quality performance to the capability of the organizational system. He argued that factors unique to individual workers only account for very minimal differences in the quality of the performance and the real cause of these variations are system factors. Included in one of the system factors is the idea that when employees work in an organizational system, their individual behavior can be maneuvered through changes in the building blocks of the organizational system as a whole. In its place, the attention of managers should be concentrated on constructing a total system in a way that it is competent of achieving a preferred

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