A review of the theory and practice of managing Total Quality Management (TQM) : An integrative framework

Order Description

required to reflect on your learning from the article with regard to the theory and practice of quality management. please cite examples from real-world organizations and quality practices to
further support your views.

Answer

Total Quality Management (TQM) is an approach that seeks to improve quality and
performance which will meet or exceed customer expectations. This can be achieved by
integrating all quality-related functions and processes throughout the company. TQM
looks at the overall quality measures used by a company including managing quality
design and development, quality control and maintenance, quality improvement, and
quality assurance. TQM takes into account all quality measures taken at all levels and
involving all company employees.
For most companies today, superior product quality is at the core of their business
strategy. For these companies, attaining near-perfect product quality is seen as the
principal means of capturing market share in global competition. The prominence of
product quality in business strategy for many firms had come from the painful knowledge
that you may lose business to lower-priced products, but you win it back with superior
product quality.
Achieving superior product quality within a business requires a long-term process of
changing the fundamental culture of the organisation. This section is about Total Quality
Management (TQM), which is the process of redirecting organisation cultures toward
superior product quality.
Origins of TQM
Total quality management has evolved from the quality assurance methods that were first
developed around the time of the First World War. The war effort led to large scale
manufacturing efforts that often produced poor quality. To help correct this, quality
inspectors were introduced on the production line to ensure that the level of failures due
to quality was minimized.
After the First World War, quality inspection became more commonplace in
manufacturing environments and this led to the introduction of Statistical Quality Control
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(SQC), a theory developed by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This quality method provided a
statistical method of quality based on sampling. Where it was not possible to inspect
every item, a sample was tested for quality. The theory of SQC was based on the notion
that a variation in the production process leads to variation in the end product. If the
variation in the process could be removed this would lead to a higher level of quality in
the end product.
After World War Two, the industrial manufacturers in Japan produced poor quality items.
In a response to this, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers invited Dr. Deming
to train engineers in quality processes. By the 1950’s quality control was an integral part
of Japanese manufacturing and was adopted by all levels of workers within an
organization.
By the 1970’s the notion of total quality was being discussed. This was seen as companywide quality control that involves all employees from top management to the workers, in
quality control. In the next decade more non-Japanese companies were introducing
quality management procedures that based on the results seen in Japan. The new wave of
quality control became known as Total Quality Management, which was used to describe
the many quality-focused strategies and techniques that became the centre of focus for
the quality movement.