Total quality Management .Elements involved in TQM

The ISO 8402 has defined TQM as: “ Management approach of the organization, centered on quality, based on the participation of all its members and aiming at long term success through customer satisfaction and benefits to all members of the organization and to society” or in other words it can defined as a cost effective system for integrating the continuous quality improvement efforts of people at all levels in the organization to deliver products and services which ensures quality satisfaction.
Elements of TQM
TQM emphasizes on various elements that support the philosophies of customer focus, continuous improvement, defect prevention and recognition that all shares quality responsibility. The basic elements are as follows:
1. Management Commitment to quality: the implementation of TQM should start from top and the management has to be unwavering in its commitment to quality. The management should reflect proper control on the part of the quality of goods and services that it is giving to its customers.
2. Focus on customers: the basic emphasis of TQM should be on customer satisfaction and the management should assure that the customer’s need and expectations should be understood and met.
3. Prevention rather that detection of defects: this philosophy seeks to prevent poor quality rather than detecting and sorting out defects. The technologies evolved to prevent defects are statistical process control, continuous process improvement and problem solving and system failure analysis.
4. Universal quality responsibility: according to TQM, quality is considered as a guiding philosophy that everyone shares in an organization and is not only the responsibility of the quality control department. Everyone that is responsible for the production of the good and services should share the credit of the quality of the goods and services given to the customer.
5. Quality measurement: it plays a very important aspect of TQM and quality being a measurable commodity one should be aware as to what current quality levels are prevailing and what amount of improvement is to be made in order to improve the quality of the product and should be able to meet the customer satisfaction.
6. Continuous improvement: TQM strives for continuous improvement in all areas, which is made possible by typing in closely with quality measurement and universal quality responsibility. The basic objective of this element is that it aims at zeroing on the process deficiencies that allowed the problem. It is not being attempted on a grand scale but pursued in small, incremental and manageable steps.
7. Root cause correction action: TQM seeks to identify the root cause of the problems and by implanting corrective actions that address problems at the root cause level which includes problem solving approach and systems failure analysis approach including fault free analysis and managing tracking tools.
8. Employee’s involvement and empowerment: according to TQM every employee is an active participant in goal attainment and should be provided with necessary tools and authority to overcome obstacle to achieve the goal of customer satisfaction.
9. Synergy of team: TQM emphasizes on synergy of team to tackle the problem and challenges of continuous improvement in the quality of the goods and services provided to the customer.
10. Benchmarking: This element involves defining competitor’s best features and adopting the best practices of these organization for once own operations.
11. Inventory reduction: also known as just in time inventory management, intends to address the material shortages and quality improvement i.e. the ultimate impact of this concept is that as inventory grew smaller, quality improved.
12. Value improvement: The essence of value improvement is the ability to meet customer expectation while removing unnecessary cost. Another principle of TQM is to develop long term relationship with a few high quality suppliers, rather than selecting those suppliers with the lowest initial cost. TQM philosophy believes that lower initial cost does not reflect the lowest overall life cycle cost if quality problem later immerges with the low bidder supplies.
13. Training: this is the basic element of TQM process and can be developed by encouraging continuous improvement in the quality and assuring customer satisfaction.