Rapid TQM

Total Quality Management, or TQM, is the method where employees can become involved in the continuous improvement of the production of goods and/or services. The TQM process involves eight key elements that need to be maintained in order for the process to work for the company. The biggest drawback to TQM is that in order for it to be effective it is going to take time to maintain it and for it to achieve its full potential. This is where rapid TQM comes into play. Rapid TQM takes TQM and tweaks it so that it is 20 to 30 times faster than the original TQM.

With rapid TQM, your organization will be able to implement changes in weeks, and you will be able to realize the full potential of TQM in months. However, in order to achieve rapid TQM your company is going to have to become more efficient in problem solving. The reason for this is that rapid TQM asks that you solve the right problem and not use the data that you have collected to solve what might be the wrong problem. The best way to find out what problems need to be solved is through conversations with your employees or through rapid data collection.

In order to solve the problems with rapid TQM the first thing that you are going to need to do is to define in terms of customer experiences. One way to do this is to focus on representative surveys rather than large-scale surveys, but mostly you will want to rely on subjective data that is placing the blame on specific groups. After this, you will want to check with the rest of your company about the problem by publicly posting the problem in your company. Publicly posting the problem will help you gather information, but it will also help you solve the problem because people will being discussing it and coming up with their own ideas on how to fix the problem. The last step you need to follow is to restate the problems in the positive and negative so that you can expand what is being examined by the problem solving team.

With TQM, companies are faced with holding many meetings, which also slows down the entire TQM process. With rapid TQM, your company is going to need to hold fewer meetings, which means that you will be able to achieve quicker results for your company. When having these meetings the best thing that you can do is to find and hire a facilitator. This person should be somebody who is outside of the company because they are not going to participate in the meetings, they need to stay neutral so that they can gather all of the ideas without evaluating the before everything is collected. Another thing that the facilitator should do is gather as much information as possible before the meeting starts because this will help reduce the amount of time spent in the meeting because most of the stuff that needs to be done for the meeting is already done.

With rapid TQM how your company is going to collect, the data it needs is going to be different because you will be using easier and faster ways of collecting data. In rapid TQM, you will only be collecting data that you need. To do this you are going to need to have a clear idea of what data you need, and make sure you do not collect more data than what you need. The best way to do this is to develop a scoring system for the data, which can be used to validate the accuracy of the data collected.

With rapid TQM, you are going to get more from your effort. The reason for this is that you are going to be avoiding the cost and time involved in having separate improvement projects in each unit because the goal is to roll out improvements in one section of the company to the rest of the company. This can be accomplished by changing membership in teams, using storyboards or by appealing to your employees beyond the rational arguments.