Advantages of Total Quality Management

Quality is the first target of TQM and the target is the first characteristic of TQM. Quality is customer satisfaction. This means that you can never become satisfied with your level of customer service you must continue to strive to do better. The key to this is to continue to be innovative and to keep trying new ways doing things in an attempt to satisfy a customer.

The next characteristic is scope. Scope ensures the quality of the product. TQM states that you need to extend production processes and standards to suppliers and sub-contractors therefore making them partially responsible for the quality of the product. This means that a supplier will have to ensure the quality of the material that he is supplying. Scope also means that you may need to amend your ordering process in order to match production processes.

Form is the next step or characteristic of TQM. Simply put it is putting plans and programs in place that can catch and correct problems before they happen. Instead of taking a finished product and reworking it, you fix problems in the production process so that the end product does not require any fixing.

Unlike many forms of quality management TQM focuses on the human input. It also takes other factors into consideration such as supplies, machines, money, and manufacturing processes, but the focus is the human input into the quality of the end product. If the employees are quality people who clearly understand the level of quality you require, they will strive to reach those goals. Implementing TQM means that you have to bring your employees to your quality level with training.

Organization and teamwork are the next characteristics of TQM. All levels from the highest management to the newest hourly employee have to work together and communicate in order to reach the highest level of quality. The last characteristic is management skills and tools. Management must ensure that employees understand that the goal is to do the job right the first time in order to achieve quality and control the cost of doing business.