Total Quality Management

Now-a-days, customers demand products/services with greater durability and reliability at the most economic price. This forces producers to strictly follow quality procedures right from design till shipment and installation of the products. So that goal of any competitive industry is to provide a product or service at the most economical costs, ensuring full customer satisfaction. This can be achieved through Total Quality Management (TQM), because, quality is not a technical function, but a systemic process extending throughout all phases of the business, e.g., marketing, design, development, engineering, purchasing, production/operations.

As per Feigebaum, “Total Quality Management is an effective system of integrating the quality development, quality maintenance and quality improvement efforts of various groups in an organization so as to enable marketing, engineering, production and service at the most economical levels which allow for full customer satisfaction”.

Benefits of TQM

The benefits of TQM can be classified into the following two categories:

1. Customer satisfaction oriented benefits: The benefits under this category are listed below:

• Improvement in product quality.
• Improvement in product design.
• Improvement in production flow.
• Improvement in employee morale and quality consciousness.
• Improvement of product service.
• Improvement in market place acceptance.

2. Economic improvements oriented benefits: The benefits under this category are as follows:

• Reductions in operating costs.
• Reductions in operating losses.
• Reductions in field service costs.
• Reductions in liability exposure.

Source: KumarAnil, Suresh N. (2009), Production and operations management, New Age International Pvt Ltd; 2nd Ed. edition.