Quality control is important for every business that delivers tangible products or services. These businesses must make significant efforts to ensure that their products turn out with the highest quality and performance capacity. This necessitates the increasing adoption of the Total Quality Management (TQM) framework by most product-oriented companies. This article discusses the concept of TQM and the role it plays in the productive workplace.
What is it?
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management framework that borders on the need for organizations to pay close attention to the quality of their products. It requires these organizations to coordinate efforts across all levels to enable improvement in their product/service consistently. Its ultimate goal is to cut down wastage and promote efficiency by effectively managing the company's production processes.
It does this by tracking and evaluating the performance of its processes and by making any necessary adjustments. When this is done, the quality of its output is significantly assured, leaving behind satisfied customers that always come back for more. It is mostly premised on eight principles that'll be briefly discussed below.
1. Customer-focused
It promotes the understanding of specific customer needs. It also demands that effort is made to meet them in a timely, affordable, and effective manner.
2. Employee engagement
It acknowledges that employee engagement must be positive, responsive, and efficient to promote a productive workplace.
3. Process approach
This follows from the belief that all work processes must follow a logical order to be effective at all times.
4. System Integration
This ensures that the policies, strategies, and standards employed by all and sundry in a work environment (and the responsibilities assigned to them) must be well understood.
5. Strategic and systematic approach
This demands that businesses design and employ strategies around quality performance to ensure customer satisfaction.
6. Continuous improvement
It seeks to promote a culture of consistent innovation and improvement to a system, its processes, and the product it delivers.
7. Decision-making based on facts
This demands that data is collected, analyzed, and translated to act on all the recommendations that are made. TQM enables informed decision-making on issues of marketing and operational strategies, among other things.
8. Effective Communication
Effective communication promotes a culture of collaboration and responsibility. It helps to define conversations around roles and objectives, measure performance, and initiate processes in the productive workplace.
When do we use it?
Organizations in the following situations use TQM:
When a company looks to formulate a strategic and systematic approach to its future operations.
When it needs to address the cause of customer dissatisfaction or a growing rejection of its products by the market.
When companies look to measure the performance of their processes: It looks out for soft/weak spots, address them, and thus, improve their quality.
When there is an increasingly disturbing trend of customer complaints bordering on defects to products.
What business questions is it helping us to answer?
Below is a list of the questions that the TQM framework helps companies answer:
How does the company approach matters of quality control and process improvement? Does it adhere to best practices and commit effort to quality assurance?
What distinctions exist between its process and product quality procedures and how does it manage both to achieve its objectives?
What are the cost implications of ensuring that it consistently delivers a high-quality and defect-free product yield? How far is it willing to go to maintain quality standards?
What quality assurance measures are put in place to reduce defects and cut back drastically on wastages or product returns?
How do we use it?
Below is a brief outline of the means a company can take to practice TQM.
Step 1
The first step is the "Planning and Diagnosis Stage." Here, the company assembles key personnel to deduce the factors causing a problem with its products or likely to become a problem. It examines its processes, accesses the personnel, and measures their performance.
Step 2
The second stage can be called the "Fixing Stage." Here, solutions to the existing problems are preferred, analyzed, tested, and ultimately affected.
Step 3
This is referred to as the "Checking Stage." It involves rigorous testing of the product to ensure that the necessary changes have been effected. The product's performance is then measured in comparison to a standard to gauge its expected performance.
Step 4
Once the product has been proven to work optimally for its design purpose, it can be a certified fit for use. This clean bill of health provides quality assurance and reasonable affirmation that the product can satisfactorily provide its intended value.
Practical example
The popular car manufacturing company, Toyota, provides an ideal example of a company that practices TQM. This automobile giant employs the key elements/practices of TQM in matters of management and operation. It has continued to innovate since the time of the Kanban board and group command cards to more novel communication strategies.
Its adoption of the "Statistical Quality Control" system predisposes it to fact-based decision-making on operational management issues. Likewise, its introduction of the ''Creative Idea Suggestion System" in 1951 ensures that its workers take responsibility for the work that is done. This way, it has promoted a culture of shared responsibility and discipline as workers are encouraged to suggest helpful ideas.
These ideas help create better processes, more rigorous checking/testing procedures, and improvement strategies. In the end, its vehicles turn out to be of the highest quality.
Advantages
TQM is designed to help cut back wastage. It is tailored to improve the quality of products and services so that they turn out with fewer defects and challenges.
Its ultimate goal is to facilitate customer satisfaction. This leads to a high customer retention rate, increased patronage and market share, and a strong brand image.
TQM helps create a culture of consistency and quality improvement. This creates an efficient work environment that is the precursor to a more productive workplace.
It provides a cost-saving measure for companies due to its emphasis on quality control. The less money spent on correcting product defects, the more money can be saved and converted into more productive use.
It introduces changes and reforms that have long-term effects on organizations.
Disadvantages
Ineffectual measurement techniques and poor or inaccurate data will limit its effect.
It may take a lot of effort from management and other staff to be implemented. Its strive to attain perfection means that it'll demand the best of resources and manpower exertion to be undertaken.
It will not present as a quick fix to any problems encountered in the workplace. This is because it takes as much time as possible to achieve its intended result.
It can create an extremely monotonous and bureaucratic work process or environment. This may inadvertently lead workplace managers to focus overly on the goal rather than the means to achieve it.
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