Key Points

  • There is no question that Total Quality Management is here to stay.
  • This methodology has a rich history that speaks directly to its ability to stay relevant in the future.
  • All eight main principal steps are relevant across various industries, including manufacturing and others.

The origins of Total Quality Management and its ability to exceed customer expectations have surprisingly been around for a long time. You can trace its origins to just after World War II, something most people don’t know. Given that it has been around for so long, Total Quality Management has been at the forefront of improving the bottom line of companies around the world for decades.

Ultimately, it should go without saying that Total Quality Management (TQM) has been and will continue to be integral to companies worldwide. Not only will it help a company deliver a better customer experience, but it can increase employee productivity as well as being a clear differentiator for why a customer should choose your company over a competitor.

The History of Total Quality Management

TQM - Total Quality Management, word cloud and hand with marker concept on white background.

Around 100 years ago, William Edwards Deming, an American statistician, began to realize there was a serious problem with US manufacturing. What Deming learned was that there was too much control in the hands of management, rather than the factory workers who were doing the work. Deming believed that workers could provide key insights into increasing efficiency on the production line. 

While this might be something we can easily recognize as a flaw today, it wasn’t back when Deming first started to take notice. Having been asked to participate in working with the US government to conduct a census in post-war Japan, Deming noticed that General Douglas MacArthur was unable to complete a phone call due to Japan’s damaged infrastructure. 

All of this came to a head as Deming began to train Japanese engineers, managers, and scholars around the idea of quality. Deming told Japanese business leaders that if they could improve quality, they would reduce expenses, all while increasing productivity and likely gaining market share. Fast forward to today, and Japanese businesses take the idea of quality to heart, helping create one of the most industrialized economies in the world. 

What Is Total Quality Management

If you are trying to define Total Quality Management, the good news is that it’s pretty straightforward. In basic terms, TQM, as it’s most commonly known, is a management approach that looks to deliver long-term success to a business through customer satisfaction.

To get to this point, TQM enables companies to improve their organizational processes, which results in being more efficient across the board. This increase in efficiency means that there is growth in the bottom line as well as resources and materials, including employee time, that is no longer being wasted.

Why Is TQM Still Relevant Today? 

For businesses, Total Quality Management (TQM) is essential for several reasons, which is why it remains relevant today. Among these reasons is that it can significantly help improve customer satisfaction by meeting or exceeding customer expectations. By doing so, companies earn loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing, which can, in turn, lead to repeat business and new customers simultaneously. 

Another reason for TQM’s continued relevance is that it can help reduce costs and improve overall organizational efficiency. You should also consider improving employee morale, which can likely stem from employees feeling involved in decisions that help make their day-to-day work even better. Empowered employees are often more likely to engage in the quality improvement process, resulting in a more engaged workforce that translates to a larger bottom line. 

As important as these steps are, there are several additional reasons why Total Quality Management (TQM) remains highly relevant today. As TQM relies heavily on data-driven decision-making, and with data being increasingly focused across organizations of all sizes today, it remains a highly relevant methodology. The rise of AI, which enables faster and more accurate data processing than ever before, suggests that Total Quality Management (TQM) will be more successful than it has been. 

Total Quality Management Principles

Customer First

The very first principle of TQM is to focus on the customer. Whether this is through direct customer input, such as surveys or one-on-one conversations, they will provide you with the exact feedback you need to make improvements. Any learnings from customers can be directly incorporated into the TQM system to help improve the manufacturing process, creating greater efficiency and targeting customer feedback. 

Employee Involvement

If you think about how involved employees should feel working for a company, the quick and easy answer is that they should feel very involved. It should go without saying that employees who feel heard and seen are likely to be more productive than those who feel ignored and not represented. A basic principle of TQM is to involve employees, the individuals doing the actual work, from the very beginning to get their point of view.

Continuous Improvement

The entire concept of Continuous Improvement and Total Quality Management should make sense on several levels. As companies learn more about what their customers expect, they should want to continually make improvements to deliver the best possible customer experience. This is a key differentiator between Company A and Company B, so utilizing a Total Quality Management system can have massive bottom-line benefits.

Adhering to processes

Every rollout of Total Quality Management within an organization requires several key elements. This means an organization must lock down its workflows and document them specifically so that new employees can read through and understand how everything currently works. The bottom line is that every employee should know exactly what their role is within a well-defined process.

Thinking Strategically 

If an organization has a vision and a mission, any process rolled out as part of Total Quality Management (TQM) should reflect them. Companies should be dedicated to making decisions that prioritize quality as the core driver of everything they do, with the ultimate goal of generating long-term revenue.

Using Data

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Unsurprisingly, data is going to be a heavy focus for TQM as well, as it’s arguably one of the most important components of decision making. No TQM improvements can be rolled out on instinct; instead, these decisions must be based on concrete data points. By analyzing large amounts of data, quality can be improved, as it’s clearly identifiable where weaknesses exist within the organization. 

Integrated Systems 

If a company focuses on integrated systems, Total Quality Management will be more successful in the long run. Working in a silo won’t allow for any meaningful or lasting quality improvements. Instead, TQM should be heavily focused on ensuring that different teams and groups are all on the same page about where they want to be and should be doing so by sharing any necessary information. 

Communication Is Key

In yet another unsurprising discovery, communication is going to be highly critical of any TQM success stories. There must be strong communication taking place across an organization, from leadership to employees and vice versa. Communication is crucial for motivating employees, and leaders will hear from their employees what they need to make changes. 

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Three Lean Tools

In the grand scheme, you may have more questions about Total Quality Management, and that’s okay. It’s also why you should do some extra reading about the common myths that surround the TQM methodology and how real or not these myths truly are. You might even have questions about how to adopt TQM into your organizational roadmap, and we have you covered on this front as well.

Of course, if you want to do some reading that doesn’t revolve around Total Quality Management, we have you covered again. Turn your attention to something new, like a beginner’s guide on the Five Focusing Steps in the Theory of Constraints. Additionally, a highly popular methodology, you may learn some interesting alternatives to TQM and how they differ. 

Conclusion 

At the end of the day, Total Quality Management is here to stay. While it may be among the older productivity methodologies available today, it remains highly relevant across various businesses. In fact, with data more prevalent than ever, thanks to AI learning, there is hope that TQM will see even more use cases in the future.

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