Total Quality Management

Total quality management or TQM is an integrative philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes.

TQM is based on the premise that the quality of products and processes is the responsibility of everyone involved with the creation or consumption of the products or services offered by an organization, requiring the involvement of management, workforce, suppliers, and customers, to meet or exceed customer expectations.

Cua, McKone, and Schroeder (2001) identified nine common TQM practices:

  1. cross-functional product design
  2. process management
  3. supplier quality management
  4. customer involvement
  5. information and feedback
  6. committed leadership
  7. strategic planning
  8. cross-functional training
  9. employee involvement

Read more about Total Quality Management:  TQM and Six Sigma

Famous quotes containing the words total, quality and/or management:

    “The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”
    —John Steinbeck (1902–1968)

    “Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannnot endure it.... Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.”
    —George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    “The Management Area of Cherokee
    National Forest, interested in fish,
    Has mapped Tellico and Bald Rivers
    And North River, with the tributaries
    Brookshire Branch and Sugar Cove Creed:
    A fishy map for facile fishery....”
    —Allen Tate (1899–1979)