Total Quality Management
Total quality management, commonly abbreviated as TQM, is the process of ensuring error-free business operations to offer quality goods and services to customers.
Providing quality goods and services is the main vision of every business, irrespective of its size, type, and industry it belongs to. This is when total quality management comes into the picture.
TQM, in simpler words, is the technique to identify errors or potential issues in manufacturing. The process helps businesses to address such issues before it gets too late, thereby producing high-quality services for their customers.
Let’s dive in and understand everything about total quality management.
Here, we will discover:
What is Total Quality Management?
TQM is a process that helps employers to run their businesses in an organized way. The process not just improves internal but external processes as well. It also helps companies to produce the best quality goods and services for their customers.
The Importance of Total Quality Management
TQM is primarily important to ensure high-quality goods and services. Other than that, here are a few more reasons why the process is important for businesses:
- It outlines the specific standards for product quality
- It gives employees an idea about their roles and responsibilities in a written form
- It helps businesses to explain the designs for material quality and the rules for approval.
- It comes in handy while planning and building company structure and choosing tools that work well
Objectives of TQM
Here are some basic objectives of total quality management:
- To ensure enhanced quality of product and services with bare minimum variations along the way
- To provide consistent and quick responses to customer issues and requirements
- To adapt to market trends without putting in any extra efforts
- To cut down any repetitive tasks that do not contribute to the overall quality of the project
Primary Elements of TQM
Now, let’s look at the five primary elements that make up the definition of total quality management:
Customer First
The very first concept of TQM is to prioritise customers. This means you will have to put your clients and users at the centre. This is certainly because it is them who decide the quality of your services/goods. So, every product should be designed while keeping customers’ needs in mind.
Employees’ Contribution
The support of employees plays a pivotal role in TQM. Without them, you will never be able to improve the overall sales, operations and efficiency. To help them be their best productive selves, make sure they have a clear understanding of the goals and vision of your company. Plus, give them the necessary training and tools to empower them.
Process-Centered
When it comes to total quality management, following a process is crucial. When you operate according to pre-defined processes, you will be able to make the right decisions at the right time, thereby making sure that goods/services are delivered with utmost quality.
Integrated System
Your organization may have a number of departments and each one of it will have a specific set of duties and responsibilities. TQM can help you ensure that all your departments work hand-in-hand.
Planned & Organised Approach
When you identify, understand, and manage processes in a more streamlined manner, it will help your entire company to reach its ultimate goal effortlessly and effectively.
Benefits of TQM
It’s now time to explore the top benefits of total quality management:
Cost Effective
The best thing about TQM is that it cuts down the overall quality costs. The principle is pretty simple– eliminating the production of bad goods or services is better than having to pay due to problems with quality. So, the main goal is to make services and goods with zero defects or issues.
More Efficiency
Cutting costs can lead to increased productivity. And, being productive means producing high-quality goods/services with minimum utilization of resources. Not to forget, better tools, the latest technology, and skilled employees are very important to ensure increased productivity along the way.
Zero Repetitive Tasks
As we already discussed in the above section, TQM applies a systematic approach. This, in turn, helps all departments to do their jobs more efficiently, thereby keeping repetitive and time-consuming tasks at bay. This even saves a large chunk of time and avoids task duplication.
Encourages New Ideas
TQM lets businesses look into issues and figure out how to fix them. As a result, they get to learn more and change how they sell themselves.
It Makes Customers Happy
Total quality management aims to make services and goods better over time so that customers are less likely to complain. This makes customers happy and satisfied, promoting the goodwill of the company.
There you go!
We hope now you have a clear understanding of total quality management!