What is Total Quality Management?

What is Total Quality Management?
By David Kall

Total Quality Management, often called TQM, is a mindset and a set of well proven processes for achieving the mindset. The mindset is that everyone in your organization understands what their customers expectations are and they meet those expectations every time.

Understanding and meeting customer expectations is a challenging proposition and requires processes that support continuing progress toward the goal of meeting customer expectations the first time, every time.

There is a great deal of value to you if your organization adopts this mindset, right through the whole organization.

1. You will have satisfied customers who will want to continue doing business with you. A satisfied customer is the least expensive way to generate revenue and profit.  
2. Your operating costs will be kept at a minimum because your employees will not be occupied with customer service problems, rework, etc. You should expect to see a 10% savings in your operating costs after six months using the David Butler TQM Process if you have a manufacturing company.
   
   If you are in a service business you should expect 20% reduction in operating overhead due to the higher personnel component of your business.
3. You will be able to expand you business without hiring additional staff. Your staff will be much more productive because they will have well documented processes for doing their job and no misunderstanding about what you and your customers expect of them.
4. You will have employees who are better motivated and satisfied with their jobs. Your hourly employees are the key to successful implementation of the TQM process because they know best the root cause of problems keep your organization from meeting customer expectations. Once they understand you are committed to this mindset, their supervisors have the tools and know-how to find and correct problems, and they are empowered to take a key role in improving their organization, you will have lots of happy campers!

Is too much quality possible? Yes! The key is to understand your customers' expectations and meet, not exceed, them. Customers don't expect you to exceed their expectations because they know it costs you money to do so. If you customer expects two ounces of ice cream with his pie, he may be unhappy with you if you give him more - he will get fat.

So if TQM is such a hot idea, why is your business surviving just fine now? If you can answer the following questions to your satisfaction, you have a quality system that works today:

1. Am I losing customers due to poor quality?
2. Are my operating costs rising faster than my revenue?
3. Is employee morale falling due to low productivity?
4. Am I seeing increased competition from GATT, NAFTA, etc.?
5. Am I under pressure from my supplies and customers to meet ISO standards?

TQM has been available for many years. It was originally developed in the US and the Japanese were the first to visualize its benefits and apply it successfully. They found that if management and employees could do joint problem solving, everyone was committed to the solution.

If their organization had a set of tools for continuous learning, they were able to manage change much more easily and with less disruption. And when they really attacked and fixed the root causes of their problems, customer satisfaction rose and costs declined. Imagine—a system that lets you achieve those two objectives simultaneously! Finally, they had a process for measuring the cost of non-quality (PONQ) which allowed them to solve their most costly problems first and to hold supervision accountable for achieving continuous improvement until customer satisfaction was achieved.

TQM programs are a dime a dozen, what makes this one different and the one you should choose? After talking to many small business people, David Butler concluded there were only three key reasons to select a TQM product:

1. It had to be implimentable with a minimum of outside help. This keeps down your cost and gets you and your management team involved in the process. Without your commitment and leadership, any quest for customer satisfaction is bound to fail.
2. You and your staff have lots of demands on your time so this process has to be implimentable on your time schedule, not that of an outsider. The faster you implement the program, the faster you see results. But you don't have to drop everything and make this your life. Actually, the time commitment you need to make is very small, especially in light of the benefits you can achieve.
3. Most TQM programs have failed during the implementation phase because there is no clear roadmap from concept to application. David Butler has developed clear and easily understandable directions for your supervisors and employees to learn and use the tools of TQM. If you need help, we will provide it to you.

Having defined TQM, its benefits, and a little about David Butler's product, are you interested? If so, David Butler's TQM product can start making happy customers and better margins for you!