Basic Principles of TQM

Total Quality Management (TQM) is an organization-wide approach to quality in which quality is built into every process, product, and service rather than caught afterward by inspection. It grew out of the work of quality pioneers such as W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, and Kaoru Ishikawa, was refined by Japanese manufacturers including Toyota, and later influenced frameworks such as the ISO 9000 standards, Lean, and Six Sigma.

Core principles

Although there is no single agreed list, most descriptions of TQM share the same handful of principles:

• Customer focus — the customer ultimately defines quality, so understanding customer needs comes first.
• Total employee involvement — everyone in the organization, at every level, contributes to quality.
• Process approach — work is understood as a series of processes that can be defined, measured, and improved.
• Continuous improvement — steady, incremental progress (the Japanese term is Kaizen) rather than occasional big fixes.
• Fact-based decisions — decisions rest on measured data, not guesswork.
• Good supplier relationships — suppliers are treated as partners in quality.

From inspection to prevention

Traditional quality control is mostly reactive: it inspects finished goods and removes the defective ones. TQM is proactive. It aims to prevent defects by improving the processes that create the product, because preventing a problem is almost always cheaper than fixing it later.

Quality is everyone’s job

Under TQM, quality is not the responsibility of a single department. Design, production, marketing, support, and administration all affect the customer’s experience, so all of them share responsibility for quality.