Total Quality Management Philosophies

The basis for TQM is to prevent defect or trouble with the Quality from the beginning. Applying statistical techniques and management skills to examine, control and supervise factors that may affect on the appearance of defects during the whole process, in research phase, design phase and in other services relating to the development of Quality.

Applying TQM will not only improve the product quality or increase productivity but also enhance the effectiveness of the whole system due to the principle "always do correctly the correct works at the very beginning".

According to ISO 9000, Total Quality Management is a management philosophy that seeks to focus the functions of an organization into Quality, with the participation of every member in it, in order to reach a long-lasting success by satisfying all customer requirements and bring back benefit to the members of that organization and to the society.

Management system in TQM is a system established on basis of the following philosophies:

(1) Quality can't be assured and controlled if only the output of the process is controlled. It is the whole process involving every function, every operation that create quality.

(2) The responsibility towards Quality belongs to the highest level management of the organization. To have an appropriate and effective Quality Policy, the management board must deeply change their belief in approach to improve quality. They need to make commitment and agreement to Quality activities. This is very important step in the management of quality in any organization. If you want to improve the quality, first, you have to improve the administrative operations and other supporting functions.

(3) The quality of the product depends much on the quality of Human factor, the most important factor in making product quality. Training, education must be the strategic tasks to be firstly focused in the quality improvement programs.

(4) Quality must have the attention from all the members in the organization. Therefore, Quality control system must be built upon the mutual understanding, coherence and commitment to the main goal which is the quality of the work. This will help facilitate the movements of Quality groups in the organization, which will draw people into creativity and improvement of quality activities.

(5) Toward the prevention and protection from defect, error in the production process and other operations by making best use of statistical tools to find the main causes of defect and take duly corrective actions.

(6) To avoid economic costs, these principles must be absolutely and correctly followed right at the beginning.

TQM is related directly to every production and business processes to control and prevent defect causes during the process, with the procedure to implement as follows:

1. Select process of priority to analyze
2. Analyze the process
3. Examine the process
o Target norms/ control board
o Relations with customers/suppliers
o Service contract with customers/suppliers
4. Quality Improvement method in the process

Actually, TQM is the synchronous combination of Quality Control with Productivity control for the main goal as to achive the perfection of the product, as well as the perfection of the company itself.