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 total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is ... remarkable ... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of.”
    —Frances Trollope (1780–1863)

    “The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.”
    —Lu Yu (d. 804)

    “Why not draft executive and management brains to prepare and produce the equipment the $21-a-month draftee must use and forget this dollar-a-year tommyrot? Would we send an army into the field under a dollar-a-year General who had to be home Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?”
    —Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)