Total quality management (TQM): definition, the 8 principles, and TQM vs Six Sigma and ISO 9001

What is total quality management?

Most plants start with quality as a department. Inspectors check parts at the end of the line, the good ones ship, the bad ones go to a scrap bin or a rework bench, and the quality manager answers the customer's complaints. Total quality management turns that around. The person who makes the part is responsible for its quality, the process is designed so that defects are hard to make, and the quality department's job shifts from catching bad parts to helping every area prevent them.

Each word in the name carries part of the definition. Total means everyone and everything: operators, supervisors, maintenance, purchasing, engineering, sales and suppliers, and every process from quoting an order to shipping it. Quality means meeting what the customer actually needs, first time, where the customer can be the next process on the line as well as the company that buys the product. Management means it is run as a system from the top, with goals in the plan, data on progress and a regular review, not left to good intentions.

TQM is a philosophy, so there is no single official definition and no TQM certificate a plant can hold. That is why the definitions on different sites sound slightly different. They agree on the core: customer focus, involvement of all employees, a process view of work, decisions based on facts, and continual improvement. Quality assurance vs quality control explains the two older ideas TQM builds on.

The 8 principles of total quality management

The list most often quoted is the eight principles published by ASQ, the American Society for Quality. Here is each one with what it looks like on a production floor, which is where most explanations stop short.

Juran's trilogy: planning, control and improvement

Joseph Juran edited Quality Control Handbook (McGraw-Hill, first edition 1951) and described quality as fitness for use: a product is good if it does what the user needs, reliably. His best-known model, the quality trilogy, splits quality work into three processes that every plant needs at once. He set it out in a 1986 article in ASQ's Quality Progress and in Juran on Leadership for Quality (Free Press, 1989).

TQM in a plant: an illustrative example with the cost of quality

This example is illustrative. A stamping and assembly plant sells about $2,400,000 of brackets and frames a month. Quality is run the traditional way: a final inspection crew sorts every lot, scrap goes in a bin that nobody counts until month end, and the quality manager answers customer complaints alone. The plant manager decides to run quality the TQM way and starts by putting a number on the problem.

The usual way to price quality uses four buckets. Prevention costs are spent to stop defects being made: training, FMEA reviews, error proofing. Appraisal costs are spent to find them: inspection, testing, gauges. Internal failure costs come from defects caught before shipping: scrap, rework, re-inspection. External failure costs come from defects the customer finds: returns, warranty, sorting at the customer's site. Internal plus external failure is the cost of poor quality (COPQ); all four together are the cost of quality.

The numbers moved because the work changed. Each press got an hourly check sheet, so defects were counted when they happened, not at month end. The Pareto showed burrs and missing weld nuts made up most of the scrap. A quality circle of two operators, a die setter and a quality technician worked the burrs with PDCA and found that die sharpening was done by calendar, not by stroke count; changing to a stroke count cut the burrs. A sensor that stops the cycle when a nut is missing took care of the second defect. Purchasing joined the weekly review once the data showed that one steel supplier's coil caused splits. Prevention spending went up on purpose, and the failure costs fell by five times as much.

How to start TQM in a plant

TQM fails most often when it is launched as a program with a logo and a training wave, then fades. It lasts when it changes how the plant is run day to day. These seven steps start small and build the habit.

1. 1

   Leadership owns the quality goals

   The plant manager puts two or three quality goals in the yearly plan, such as customer complaints, first pass yield and cost of poor quality, and reviews them every month with the staff. If the goals belong only to the quality manager, it is not TQM.

2. 2

   Write down what the customer needs

   For the top products, list the requirements from drawings, specifications, complaints and returns. For each internal step, ask the next step what it needs. These become the checks at each station.

3. 3

   Measure the starting point

   First pass yield by line, cost of poor quality by bucket, complaints per month, and the TQM self-assessment scored by people from several levels. The first pass yield calculator and the COPQ calculator do the arithmetic.

4. 4

   Teach the basic tools on real data

   Short sessions for operators and supervisors on check sheets, Pareto charts, fishbone diagrams and PDCA, using defects from their own line. A tool learned on someone else's example is rarely used.

5. 5

   Start in one area

   Pick a model area and its top defect from the Pareto. A small team from that area runs PDCA on it every week until the defect falls and stays down. The model area guide explains how to pick the area.

6. 6

   Lock in what works

   Each fix goes into standard work, the control plan, a check at the station or an error-proofing device, so it survives the next shift change. The SOP guide shows the format.

7. 7

   Spread it and review it

   Copy the fixes to similar lines, start the next area, review the goals at the monthly management review, and score the self-assessment again after 6 to 12 months to see which principle moved.

The daily part matters more than the launch. A short huddle at shift start that looks at yesterday's defects and today's actions, a supervisor who asks why a part was made outside the standard, and a leader who reads the defect board every week do more for TQM than any training course. How to improve product quality covers the daily routines in more depth.