What is Total Quality Management?

What does it mean to practice Total Quality Management? According to ISO (International Organization for Standardization), there are 7 Quality Management Principles that companies follow to incorporate quality throughout the entire organization, every process, department, etc. (hence “total” quality management). Quality isn’t just a department, it is a way of practicing business from top to bottom, everyone is involved in ensuring quality is a priority in everything. It is about process thinking and risk assessment, prevention, management, and documentation.

7 Quality Management Principles:

1. Customer Focus
2. Leadership
3. Engagement of People
4. Process Approach
5. Improvement
6. Evidence-Based Decision Making
7. Relationship Management

Customer Focus: Taking a Customer Focused business approach helps companies to strive to meet and exceed customer requirements & expectations. Customer satisfaction is measured through surveys, testimonials and feedback provided to sales representatives.

Leadership: Cohesive vision and goals established in a business plan pulls all areas of the company together and gets them on the same page.

Engagement of People: It is important to utilize and value people’s skills and abilities; train, evaluate, provide feedback, and hold people accountable.

Process Approach: Focus on improving every process. Work instructions are a good way of documenting exactly how the process should run, every time.

Improvement: Measure, analyze, improve. The business plan should have clear goals set to drive systematic improvement. Corrective Action Reports (CARs) are a way of correcting problems or nonconformances, while Preventative Actions (PARs) detect potential problems or non-conformities and determine a solution to prevent them from occurring.

Evidence-Based Decision Making: Few things are black and white so a risk analysis should be performed to gather data, stats, & facts, from the information gathered, focus on what has the highest potential for risk. Find the top risk for each department to focus on to make the biggest impact.

Relationship Management: Vendors, customers, employees, community – all relationships need to be managed and nurtured.

The entire system is built on how a company assesses risk and how they document risk – there is risk involved in everything, including something as small as who a company hires to mow the lawn every other week.

Assess the risk, document the risk, and then focus on the areas that would have the greatest impact.

Interested in talking with Xymox about how a Total Quality Management business model drives us to provide better service, membrane switches, and capacitive touch sensors? Contact us!