Total_Quality_Management

Quality products and services are not always easy to come by in today’s businesses because of lack of quality management. Total quality management is something many companies strive to attain. In this essay, I will be defining total quality management, describing its impact the globalization quality, as well as comparing and contrasting traditional management styles with quality focused management styles. Total Quality Management is a strategic system involving teamwork, which is essential to the success of all businesses. This process has been developed and strengthened over several decades. This has caused businesses to work together to improve their knowledge of recent technology and approaches to training. Total Quality Management helps to competitively meet the demands of customers by bringing organizations together with management enabling professionals to improve customer quality. Total Quality is a management approach which originated in Japan in the 1950s and was brought to the US by Deming and then gained popularity throughout the 1980s (Stark, 1998). Even with its popularity, many companies found it difficult to implement TQM because the upper management did not invest monies in training their top leadership and have everyone involved in the new product development and involved with the new customer drives, as this would have allowed their companies to have continued growth. Some of the key points of TQM are having upper management integral in the process, customer-driven quality, commitment from the company, continuity and movement toward development and improvement, the employees should be active participants in the process, and the company should act fast on all responses, and the culture should be conducive for TQM to be implemented (Stark, 1998). The traditional management model of "management by objectives" emphasizes a chain of command in which objectives are translated into work standards or quotas. Performance of employees is guided and evaluated according to numerical goals. As a result, workers, managers and supervisors get caught up in protecting themselves. Looking good overshadows a concern for the customer or the organization's long-term success. Employees, desperate to meet quotas, lose sight of the larger purpose of work. A common example is when sales people are pushed to boost business and make promises production can't keep. The total quality management style is certainly different from the traditional management styles that many company’s have and continue to use. The traditional idea of producing as much product as possible in a given shift has changed. With top quality management, the idea is to produce as much product that meets the company’s quality standards in a given shift. With the company’s reputation on the line, top quality management prefers to spend the extra time necessary to produce a product or service they are proud to put their name on, in spite of the costs involved with providing the extra quality. Traditional management, while still caring about quality, did not put a premium on quality like the TQM managers do, and therefore, the quality of the products in a company that employs traditional management styles will inevitably be less than that of a TQM company. It can be said that all employees in any organization want to produce quality. The biggest difference is the focus that TQM managers put on quality vs. traditional managers. In order to apply Total Quality Management to an organization one must pursue new strategic thinking; meaning if the organization is not Quality Style Management, then conversion needs to take place. The process initially starts with management commitment and a total quality committee must be established Employees at all levels need to know the customer and set true customer requirements and expectations (Fraser, 1996). The organization as a whole needs to work on prevention not correction. So strengths and weaknesses need to be identified, eliminate chronic waste, continual learning opportunities and improvement, and have a unity purpose. The few factors that have been discussed should be applied to all levels of an organization from top to bottom to the customer. In conclusion, Total Quality Management theory realizes that the key to improving quality is to improve processes that define, produce and support an organizations end product or service. Total Quality Management theory realizes that people and the processes in which they operate are keys in optimal organizational functioning. TQM theory recommends that an organization get processes in control and work with other employees and managers to identify process problems and eliminate them. Finally, TQM theory realizes that managers and/or supervisors must work on processes by providing training and tool resources, by measuring and reviewing process performance (metrics), and by improving process performance with the help of those who use the processes. References Stark, J. (1998). A few words about TQM. Retrieved August 29, 2007, from http://www.johnstark.com/fwtqm.html Fraser, J. M. (1996, Jan. 1). Implementing total quality. Retrieved February 2, 2008, from http://www.allbusiness.com/professional-scientific/architectural-engineering/548320-1.html