Total Quality Management
Total Quality Management is a management approach where an organisation strive to provide customers with product and services of a high quality and a continuous improvement of the means to do so. TQM requires an establishment of a culture of improvement where quality is top priority in the whole organisation; from floor to top management. The culture needs quality in all aspects of the organisation’s operations and seeks to integrate all organisational functions focusing on compliance with customer needs. The focus is proactive; processes and productions is being done right initially in order to eliminate defects and waste.
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a Quality Management System (QMS) where a culture of improvement results in an organisation continuously improves the quality of products and service to costumers. Total Quality Management was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the use of TQM is not too widespread today due to competition from other management systems such as Lean Manufacturing and ISO9000.
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Quality Management Systems
The main goal in business is to focus on the profit and savings, and also on the additional revenue that a company can achieve. The way to reach this objective is found by eliminating errors throughout the operations, production of products and services at the level of quality desired by customers. Errors can increase amount of costs significantly. To avoid errors the Quality Management Systems (QMS) are used. The purpose of QMS is to secure quality of product and manage the communication between management and employees; telling them what is required to produce and what desired quality level to be achieved of specified products and services.
QMS consists of four main components:
- Inspection, where work is physically checked in order to secure that is has been completed satisfactorily.
- Quality Control (QC), where management control techniques is used in order to achieve fulfilment of quality requirements.
- Quality Assurance (QA), where externally accredited procedures and techniques are used in order to ensure that quality management practices are carefully followed.
- Total Quality Management (TQM), where the organization is motivated to do continuous process improvements to achieve increasingly higher levels of quality.
