Total Quality Management (TQM) is an organization-wide philosophy with its core values which includes phases such as customer focus, involvement of all employees, continuous improvement and the integration of quality management into the organization as a whole.

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What are the requirements of TQM?

The four important factors of TQM are:

• Focus on Customer – Companies with TQM would be able to react or be prepared to the changing needs of customers.
• Continuous Improvement – TQM companies focus on continual improvement of the processes that lead to higher quality products and services.
• Total Participation – TQM mandates the companies to make sure there is complete involvement and participation of employees for stated principles.
• Societal Learning – TQM companies share the industry learnings to other companies to avoid reinventions, to implement quality practices and to create a value-added quality culture.

Some of the ways of addressing TQM:

• Improvement through Process Control – To meet the desired output specification, reduce the variance of the actual output by finding and removing the sources of variation in the process.
• Reactive Improvement – This approach of using 7 QC steps to improve weak process is called reactive improvement, because it reacts to already existing weaknesses.
• Proactive Improvement – Proactive Approach is used to identify the upstream criteria upon which the rest of improvement efforts are based and most widely and effectively used methodology in this process is Quality Function Deployment (QFD) which highly helps in strategic planning of businesses.
• Hoshin Management – Hoshin management aligns the activities of people throughout the company so that the company can achieve key goals and react quickly to a changing environment. It provides an important strategy for total participation as well as fulfilling its obvious purpose of company alignment.