Total Quality Management

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Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs.

1 Definition
2 Origins
3 TQM in manufacturing
4 TQM and contingency-based research
5 TQM, just another management fad?
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

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Definition

As defined by the Deming Prize Committee of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE):

"TQM is a set of systematic activities carried out by the entire organization to effectively and efficiently achieve company objectives so as to provide products and services with a level of quality that satisfies customers, at the appropriate time and price." [1]

In Japanese, TQM comprises four process steps, namely:

Kaizen – Focuses on Continuous Process Improvement, to make processes visible, repeatable and measureable.
Atarimae Hinshitsu – Focuses on intangible effects on processes and ways to optimize and reduce their effects.
Kansei – Examining the way the user applies the product leads to improvement in the product itself.
Miryokuteki Hinshisu – Broadens management concern beyond the immediate product.

TQM requires that the company maintains this quality standard in all aspects of its business. This requires ensuring that things are done right the first time and that defects and waste are eliminated from operations.

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Origins

Although W. Edwards Deming is largely credited with igniting the quality revolution in Japan starting in 1946 and trying to bring it to the United States in the 1980s, Armand V. Feigenbaum was developing a similar set of principles at General Electric in the United States at around the same time. "Total Quality Control" was the key concept of Feigenbaum's 1951 book, Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration, a book that was subsequently released in 1961 under the title, Total Quality Control (ISBN 0070203539). Joseph Juran, Philip B. Crosby, and Kaoru Ishikawa also contributed to the body of knowledge now known as TQM.

The American Society for Quality says that the term Total Quality Management was first used by the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command "to describe its Japanese-style management approach to quality improvement."[2] This is consistent with the story that the United States Department of the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center began researching the use of statistical process control (SPC), the work of Juran, Crosby, and Ishikawa, and the philosophy of Deming to make performance improvements in 1984. This approach was first tested at the North Island Naval Aviation Depot.

In his paper, "The Making of TQM: History and Margins of the Hi(gh)-Story" from 1994, Xu claims that "Total Quality Control" is translated incorrectly from Japanese since there is no difference between the words "control" and "management" in Japanese. William Golimski refers to Koji Kobayashi, former CEO at NEC, being the first to use TQM, which he did during a speech when he got the Deming prize in 1974.

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TQM in manufacturing

Quality assurance through statistical methods is a key component in a manufacturing organization, where TQM generally starts by sampling a random selection of the product. The sample can then be tested for things that matter most to the end users. The causes of any failures are isolated, secondary measures of the production process are designed, and then the causes of the failure are corrected. The statistical distributions of important measurements are tracked. When parts' measures drift into a defined "error band", the process is fixed. The error band is usually a tighter distribution than the "failure band", so that the production process is fixed before failing parts can be produced.

It is important to record not just the measurement ranges, but what failures caused them to be chosen. In that way, cheaper fixes can be substituted later (say, when the product is redesigned) with no loss of quality. After TQM has been in use, it's very common for parts to be redesigned so that critical measurements either cease to exist, or become much wider.

It took people a while to develop tests to find emergent problems. One popular test is a "life test" in which the sample product is operated until a part fails. Another popular test is called "shake and bake", in which the product is mounted on a vibrator in an environmental oven, and operated at progressively more extreme vibration and temperatures until something fails. The failure is then isolated and engineers design an improvement.

A commonly-discovered failure is for the product to disintegrate. If fasteners fail, the improvements might be to use measured-tension nutdrivers to ensure that screws don't come off, or improved adhesives to ensure that parts remain glued.

If a gearbox wears out first, a typical engineering design improvement might be to substitute a brushless stepper motor for a DC motor with a gearbox. The improvement is that a stepper motor has no brushes or gears to wear out, so it lasts ten or more times as long. The stepper motor is more expensive than a DC motor, but cheaper than a DC motor combined with a gearbox. The electronics is radically different, but equally expensive. One disadvantage might be that a stepper motor can hum or whine, and usually needs noise-isolating mounts.

Often, a "TQMed" product is cheaper to produce because of efficiency/performance improvements and because there's no need to repair dead-on-arrival products, which represents an immensely more desirable product.

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TQM and contingency-based research

TQM has not been independent of its environment. In the context of management accounting systems (MCSs), Sim and Killough (1998) show that incentive pay enhanced the positive effects of TQM on customer and quality performance. Ittner and Larcker (1995) demonstrated that product focused TQM was linked to timely problem solving information and flexible revisions to reward systems. Chendall (2003) summarizes the findings from contingency-based research concerning management control systems and TQM by noting that “TQM is associated with broadly based MCSs including timely, flexible, externally focused information; close interactions between advanced technologies and strategy; and non-financial performance measurement.” (p.143)

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TQM, just another management fad?

Abrahamson (1996) argued that fashionable management discourse such as Quality Circles tends to follow a lifecycle in the form of a bell curve. Ponzi and Koenig (2002) showed that the same can be said about TQM, which peaked between 1992 and 1996, while rapidly loosing popularity in terms of citations after these years. Dubois (2002) argued that the use of the term TQM in management discourse created a positive utility regardless of what managers meant by it (which showed a large variation), while in the late 1990s the usage of the term TQM in implementation of reforms lost the positive utility attached to the mere fact of using the term and sometimes associations with TQM became even negative. Nevertheless, management concepts such as TQM leave their traces, as their core ideas can be very valuable. For example, Dubois (2002) showed that the core ideas behind the two management fads Reengineering and TQM, without explicit useage of their names, can even work in a synergistic way.

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References

Abrahamson, E. (1996). "Managerial fashion." Academy of Management Review. 21(1):254-285.

Bergman, Bo & Klefsjö,Bengt, Kvalitet - från behov till användning, ISBN 91-44-01917-3, Studentlitteratur: Sweden, Lund,2001.

Chenhall, RH (2003) Management control systems design within its organizational context: findings from contingency-based research and directions for the future, Accounting, Organizations and Society 28, pp. 127-168.

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Ittner, CD and Larcker, DF (1995) Total quality management and the choice of information and reward systems, Journal of Accounting Research 33(suppl.), pp. 1-34.

Ponzi, L and Koenig, M (2002) "Knowledge management: another management fad?" Information Research, 8(1)

Sim, KL and Killough, LN (1998) The performance effects of complementarities between manufacturing practices and management accounting systems, Journal of Management Accounting Research 10, pp.325-346.