Total quality Management

Total quality Management

Total quality management (TQM) is a business philosophy that embodies the belief that the management process must focus on integrating the idea of customer driven quality throughout an organization (Zikmund, 1994). With customer as the organization's main focus, improvement of product quality and service delivery. Managers improve durability and enhance a product with additional features as the product matures in age. Managers also try to improve the ecommerce interface and speed up deliveries and improve other services in order to remain competitive.

The philosophy underlying the implementation of a Tqm strategy is to see customers and clients as the vital key to organizational success. Organizations that emphasize total quality management see their business through the eyes of their customers and clients and then measure their organization's performance against customer or client expectations.

Effective total quality management implies that the product must not be considered as being merely acceptable but must go beyond this for a given price range. For example a customer should not just feel that there was nothing wrong with the product and it was just able to perform what it was made for,but the customer should have some delightful surprises from the product and the product should provide some unexpected benefits.

The level of product quality is the degree to which a product or service is equal to or greater than customers' or clients' expectations. The formular being LPQ>CE where LPQ= level of product quality and CE= Customer / client expectation.

A Tot quality management strategy requires considerable survey research (Zikmund 1994) it expresses the conviction that in order to improve quality,the organization must regularly conduct surveys to evaluate quality improvement. The Tqm process begins with a commitment and exploration stage during which management makes a commitment to total quality assurance.

In the exploration stage,researchers are employed to to explore the needs of internal and external customers. The research must encompass thd products or service that are considered most useful by the customers,the problems of customers with the products,what aspects of the product or service have disappointed customers,what the company is doing right and what the company is doing wrong.

Then benchmarking follows the identification of the needs of customers. Business research must establish qualitative measures that can serve as benchmarks or points of comparison to evaluate future efforts. The research must establish initial measures of overall satisfaction,frequency of customers problems and quality ratings for specific attributes. The third stage in the the total quality management process is the initial Quality improvement stage. during this stage a company must establish quality improvement process within the organization. Management and staff must translate quality issues into the internal language and culture of the organization. The company must establish performance standards and expectations for improvement.

The last stage in the TQM process is the Continuous quality improvement stage. Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), is sometimes referred to as Performance and Quality Improvement (PQI),Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to

improve the quality of products, services or processes. Continuous quality improvement requires that management allow its staff to initiate problem-solving without red tapism. Staff should be able to initiate proactive communications with customers. To be successful at CQI,Management must reward performance by recognising individual staff members and groups that work dilligently towards achieving the standards set.

It should be noted that TQM should measure performance against customers' or clients' standards,not standards determined by the company's quality engineers.