How can TQM improve quality?

NASA and other companies use total quality management (TQM) to manage quality through various processes. TQM provides companies with the ability to improve their effectiveness, competitiveness, efficiency, and flexibility in order to suit the needs of their consumers. The acronym TQM is broken down as follows:

• T - Total = Quality that involves everyone at the company and all the different activities that are involved.
• Q - Quality = Meeting the customer and company expectations.
• M - Management = Quality must be measured in order to be effective.

TQM is not only a business philosophy; it can be used to improve our way of life. It is a process for improving quality in everything we do. This can be something simple like going the speed limit to avoid traffic collisions and tickets or something significant like investing money to improve your retirement account.

The process of TQM involves various responsibilities like; meeting customer satisfaction and customer requirements, reducing production time, demand-flow manufacturing, implementing improvement teams, reducing costs of services and cost of products, and improving training.

TQM has been successful at reducing costs and improving quality at several companies. Ford Motor Company, Toyota Motor Company and Motorola are just a few of the major companies who have used the TQM process.

The TQM process involves ten steps to success:

1. Pursue New Strategic Thinking
2. Know your Customers
3. Set True Customer Requirements
4. Concentrate on Prevention, Not Correction
5. Reduce Chronic Waste
6. Pursue a Continuous Improvement Strategy
7. Use Structured Methodology for Process Improvement
8. Reduce Variation
9. Use a Balanced Approach
10. Apply to All Functions

In order to follow the TQM process, it must be managed and constantly improved. A team needs to sit down together and write out the goals. These may include: defining the process, measuring and reviewing performance, analyzing problems and shortcomings, and clear communication between all parties.

Without clear and effective communication from the team, TQM will not be successful. This is not just a change you can implement on paper, it requires action from employees. Everyone at the company must understand their role in TQM and look for ways to make the entire process run smoothly.

The driving factor behind TQM is to become profitable by lowering costs due to efficiencies achieved, higher customer retention, greater attraction to new customers, and potential to charge higher prices. Keeping your company in a competitive position is also a key factor to successful TQM. In the analysis of your company you should set apart key questions such as:

• Why is my company unique?
• How is my company different from others?
• Why would potential customers choose my company over competitors?

Keeping competitive is a unique advantage to your company especially if your competitors have not yet adopted TQM.

As previously discussed, employee involvement is essential to running a successful TQM system. Each employee involved in the process is responsible to the overall goal and if they do not hold up their end, the process will fail. Employees tend to feel an increased role in the company since they have the ability to control part of their system.

Their involvement alone will directly impact the way TQM runs. This is a wonderful way to help some of your employees gain an increased role at the company, especially if you do not have open positions for job promotion.

Unlike other business process improvement strategies, TQM is not hard to implement and you will start to see results within a few weeks to a few months. This can help to keep your staff motivated about the process since they will have some results to analyze.