Total Quality Management is designed to comprehensively incorporate quality throughout an organization. You will study some fundamental definitions of quality and exercise some key quality management tools.

§ Quality § Total Quality Management (TQM) § Continuous Improvement §

Quality is the ability of a product or service to meet customer needs. However, quality must be viewed from the perspective (perception) of the customer or in the eyes of the beholder. Thus, regardless of how the producer measures the quality of their respective product/service, the ultimate measure of quality is defined by the final consumer (the customer).

Total Quality Management (TQM)

TQM refers to a quality emphasis that encompasses the entire organization from supplier to customer. Additionally, TQM emphasizes a program of continuous improvement whereby all parts of an organization are candidates to be improved. In Japan, the term kaizen describes the ongoing process of unending improvement. Typical components of a TQM program include:

• Continuous improvement or "Kaizen" in Japan, describes the ongoing process of incremental improvement.

• Benchmarking involves selecting a demonstrated standard of products, services, costs, or practices that represent the very best performance for a selected process. This benchmark or target represents the goal that an organization can compare their respective performance against. For example, a shoe manufacturer interested in improving their catalog ordering system might benchmark the Land's End catalog order taking system.

• Just-in-Time (JIT) is designed to produce or deliver goods just as they are needed. By doing this, JIT minimizes the amount of inventory carried, process cycle time, and increases quality.

• Quality Tools:
• Quality Function Deployment (QFD)
• Pareto Charts
• Fish Bone Diagrams
• Statistical Process Control

QFD is a process to effectively satisfy customer needs/requirements. Ultimately, a product/service delivered by an organization should completely satisfy the customer. QFD assists in achieving this by helping translate customer needs into the final design of the product/service. The house of quality is a graphical representation of this translation.

In order to build the house of quality, perform the following steps:

1. Identify customer wants.
2. Identify how the product/service will satisfy the customer wants.
3. Relate the customer wants to the product how's (how will the product meet the customer wants)
4. Identify relationships between the how's.
5. Develop importance ratings.
6. Evaluate competing products.

Pareto analysis allows an organization to prioritize problems, issues, errors from highest to lowest. The Pareto principle suggests that 80% of the problems are a result of only 20% of the causes.

Click here for Pareto Example.

To create a Pareto chart, open this template file. Enter each of the problem or error descriptions and frequencies in the corresponding columns in the yellow area (maximum of 20 different data points can be entered). After the data is entered, press (ctrl + p) to execute the Pareto macro. This macro will sort the data and generate a Pareto chart. To view the Pareto chart, click on the Pareto Chart tab.

The cause and effect or "Fishbone" diagram graphically presents the causes to a particular effect or problem. The reason it is called a fishbone diagram is because each branch (or bone of a fish) represents a cause.

Click here for Fishbone Example: Run of Web Cause and Effect- Fishbone (use "Back" button to return to this page) or download using PowerPoint 97 or 2000.

SPC is used to statistically monitor a process to determine it state (in or out of control). This is covered in the following module Statistical Process Control.

Inspection

The role of inspection is to ensure that a process is performing as desired. However, inspection does not correct problems, it only detects problems. Therefore, it is impossible to "inspect in"quality.