The principles
Most descriptions of TQM share eight principles, which also underlie the ISO 9000 quality management standards:
- Customer focus. Quality is defined by the customer, internal and external.
- Leadership. Leaders set the direction and create the environment in which people improve.
- Involvement of people. Everyone, at every level, is responsible for quality.
- Process approach. Work is managed as processes with inputs, outputs and owners.
- System thinking. Processes interact; improving one in isolation can harm another.
- Continual improvement. A permanent objective, not a project.
- Factual decision making. Measurements and analysis, not opinion.
- Supplier relationships. Quality is built with suppliers, not inspected in at receipt.
Where TQM came from
TQM grew from the statistical quality control work of Shewhart and Deming, Juran's management of quality and the Japanese company-wide quality control movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It was widely adopted in the West in the 1980s and 1990s; many of its practices now live inside lean, Six Sigma and ISO 9001 rather than under the TQM name.
TQM in practice
TQM is a culture more than a toolkit, but it uses specific tools: the seven basic quality tools (check sheets, Pareto charts, fishbone diagrams, control charts, histograms, scatter diagrams and flowcharts), PDCA, quality circles and cost-of-quality measures.
TQM and daily management
The principle that everyone owns quality only holds if quality is on the board that every team reviews daily. Defects, complaints and first pass yield sit beside safety and delivery on the tier board; a problem that repeats moves into structured problem solving; and the countermeasure is checked against the measure, which is the continual improvement principle made routine.