Total Quality Management - short brief

**mattonline** · 05-14-2007 12:24 PM

Hello, i've written a short article on TQM - total quality management, very short article and thought i would share...

http://www.entrepreneurforum.co.uk/s...ead.php?p=3686

thanks again.

**sspoldir** · 05-14-2007 12:38 PM

Wow... people still talk about TQM, six sigma is all the rage lately.

**jasaunders** · 05-14-2007 01:11 PM

Your article is very general, you don't really provide a lot of information in it.

And yes, TQM is still talked about... After all Six Sigma spawned off of TQM. If it wasn't for the re-emergence of quality in the 70's to combat Japanese products, we never would have arrived at six sigma.
TQM is much more of a philosophy now. Not very many people are really implementing zero defect quality systems. Using sigma tools (often times together with lean) is obviously a lot more popular.

**wattscj** · 07-01-2007 12:30 PM

jasaunders is right in the fact that Six Sigma spawned off of TQM but so did Business Process Reengineering (BPR). I still think that BPR is a better choice for quality if the company is large and has been around for a while. Since BPR tends to state that the process is inherently wrong and will probably need replaced or drasticly changed means that you can get more out of the change than you would with Six Sigma. (Even with Lean Six Sigma you wouldn't the drastic changes needed) Although if you use Lean Six Sigma you will probably get a large bang for less effort it only focuses on the fact that the process is good but some of the functions inside the process need some tweaking.

**silversurfer** · 07-01-2007 08:50 PM

Everything in use now came from TQM basically, in the same way that racing videogames spawned from the Model T. But I can't imagine a single Fortune 500 company instituting TQM in 2007. The last team I worked with on it was in 1993.

Go directly to Six Sigma for defects, go directly to CMMI or Agile for software, go directly to CMM for businesses. I don't even know anyone doing BPR, but almost everyone I know is in IT so they're strictly CMMI.

Even Kaizen and the other Toyota ideas are getting long in the tooth. This is why at least attending business school workshops is helpful if not getting that MBA. In economics class in high school we read Juran and Deming articles, in high school, I'm old.

**silversurfer** · 07-02-2007 10:09 AM

Originally Posted by NorKal

Wow, that must have been a really good highschool. I just learned about TQM, six sigma, Juran, and Deming last year in college.

It was a very special public high school and we had a really good economics teacher whose husband worked for John Kenneth Galbraith in India. so what I consider a good public high school is probably, and this is the sad part, impossible to find in 2007.

But when you're like, trying to organize an afterschool club, reading Deming is like a good way to get your plans organized.

**jasaunders** · 07-02-2007 10:34 AM

I don't know any companies specifically using TQM, but many companies looking for wuality experts still expects candidates to have extensive knowledge of TQM. I have come across a lot of job openings where they were looking for this. I also don't know anyone using BPR.

Even Six Sigma is slowly losing its momentum as companies like GE are phasing it out (although a lot of companies are still behind, phasing it in).