Total quality management (TQM) as one of the quality concepts have been the subject of discussion among management experts for years. Although there have been many reports of a positive effects of adoption of TQM there are also many reports that point out the difficulties of the implementation of TQM.Which are the main reasons of difficulties of the implementation of TQM?
Mahmoud AB, et al. Total Quality Management Boosters and Blockers in a Humanitarian Setting: An Exploratory Investigation. SAGE Open 2019;9(2):1-7. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244019841919
The main reasons of difficulties for TQM implementations are not awareness of ISO standards. The organisations must implement the Management of quality control system in accordance to all ISO standards related to the processes of that organisation. after that it is necessary to educate all employees reference the standard ISO 26000 Social responsibility. All employees should be involved into team work.
Total Quality Management (TQM) is one of the most successful approaches to managing organizations. TQM denotes a path by which – both in a stable and a transitional environment, in a professional and scientific way and by applying a variety of methods and techniques, through constant improvements and involvement of all employees – one could get to a model that enables a simultaneous achievement of the top quality level on one hand, and the top management level, on the other.
Total Quality Management is a paradigm of business success because its set up, inter alia, improves internal functions of an organization, instils confidence in customers and triggers improvement chain reactions with suppliers and stakeholders. Quality is the foundation and client orientation is the base of the entire concept of total quality management. Placing customers at the center is the main idea behind the entire quality concept around which everything is built.
Improving the capacity of an organization to understand and meet the actual customer needs, both stated and implied, is the main objective of the total quality management. Teamwork and team leadership play a specific role in the total quality management, top managers have the key responsibilities, and activities of the medium and lower level managers together with all employees are of immeasurable significance. Managing the teamwork within the Total Quality Management is not only a requirement for its set up, development and implementation, but also for its survival.
By and large, Total Quality Management is a managerial philosophy and a mode of running a business in order to achieve success. On the other hand, we live in a world in which change is becoming faster and faster. The process of dramatically accelerating change is unstoppable. Bearing that in mind, without much "digital" knowledge and skills and "out of the box thinking", traditional TQM is not enough for achieving sustained success in these turbulent crisis times.
Lack of *direct involvement* by the top leaders of the organization. Most prefer to *passively support* TQM...from the sidelines...way behind the sidelines.
The biggest hurdle is resistance to change and lack of total quality leadership.
TQM is really the best of previous quality programs put together and shouDL have been the best program to come along but with so many quality initiatives, I this one just got lost in the shuffle. There has to be a champion for the program in the C Suites and TQM seems to have never received that level of support.
Otherwise, although managers have addressed quality since the emergence of modern companies, Total Quality Management, both as a concept and program, has been more clearly defined in the past few decades, but here we are dealing with processes that are continuously upgraded and complemented. The basics of Total Quality Management comprises the seven 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
The seven Quality Management Principles listed above apply to other management systems as well. They make up a consistent network system and as such, give their full effectiveness and efficiency. Disregarding only one of the principles and its related requirements jeopardizes the overall Quality Management System. As a consistent network system, all the aforesaid principles are both individually and jointly very important for the success of management.
Total Quality Management is a comprehensive management philosophy based on labor virtues, as well as on continual changes aimed at improving business processes. To wit, within any organization, the processes are those that generate results and should be managed and improved. Applying proper quality techniques in working processes and involving all employees create the conditions for lower quality to increase to higher levels and thus bring processes to similar or equal quality levels. This increases mobility and connection of functions, offering possibilities for successful implementation of various models and procedures of process improvement. William Edwards Deming, an American theorist and one of the founders of the modern quality movement, claimed that 85 percent of quality related problems are the result of processes and not individual errors. Once you start establishing Total Quality Management, the emphasis will shift from identifying errors to reviewing and improving the processes that allow or cause such errors aiming at, if possible, permanently disabling the emergence of problems.
No individual organization, change, process or technique, however, means much by itself. People are those that breathe in life into them and who, both in normal and crisis times, are the most important factors of business success. One cannot expect processes to function better if the people managing those processes do not change for better because they are the managers of everything and everything depends on them. People who manage and those we work with are the key both to our success and failures. An organization should be approached as guided by the universal principles of total quality and only then can employees give a momentum to tacit creativity and energy, balance systems with processes and work more efficiently on continuous improvement. Total Quality Management, therefore, is not just a fashion whim or trend in management. Experiences of many companies all over the world prove that this is a revolutionary step forward in business and the return to some of the fundamental management ideas.
Putting users at the center of attention is the main idea of the whole way of viewing quality, around which everything is built. Success in the long run will be reserved only for those who will know how to anticipate not only next global developments, but also future customer needs, in parallel with keeping up with continuous improvements in all areas of life and work. These requirements are not easy to fulfil in the long run and that is why they are not only most important but also crucial factors of Total Quality Management. Why is this so? It is very important that Total Quality Management is not a task to be completed and you are done with it.
Total Quality Management is an endless road. Improvements must continue and be sustained for many reasons, but it seems that those dictated by competition and users in times of accelerated changes and all kinds of unpredictable events are of crucial importance. If you do not move forward when it comes to quality, soon enough you will lag behind your competition. The only answer is continuous improvements and focusing on users whose needs change; therefore, ongoing improvements do not require only keeping up pace with modern trends but also predict users` demand. The art of prediction is one of the main factors in achieving success.
Enhancing a company’s ability to understand and meet actual customer needs, both indicated and implied ones, represent the main objective of Total Quality Management. Quality is the foundation, and customer orientation is the essence of the Total Quality Management concept. Here one should always have in mind that the quality of products and services is what a customer thinks it is, and not what we think it is. In an era of consumerism and different value measures, people increasingly realize that they have to manage quality in order to avoid poor quality to manage them.
There is no unique and perfect method of establishing a Total Quality Management. The best methods are those tailored to individual organizations and environment in which they operate. A strict compliance to standards does not mean that there is no room for creativity in Total Quality Management and that organizations should refrain from searching for models that will best suit their needs. On the contrary, best achievement people have reached by using unfathomable power of imagination and intuition.
But there are some universal values that are the guiding ideas to success of this plan such as customer satisfaction, knowledge, competence and innovation, top quality, commitment, trust and respect, willingness to change and conflict resolution, leadership, team work management, process approach, involvement of all employees, flawless business, a sense of urgency, time, risk and much more.
Among all the above variables, it is the knowledge, competence and innovation that are the key requirements without which there can be no meaningful success in Total Quality Management. It is impossible to improve your own products without improving yourself. At the times of dramatically accelerating changes, it is knowledge that becomes obsolete the fastest. Challenges we face in today’s time require different knowledge and skills than those we obtained through formal education.
TQM implementation is spreading to many organizations the world over and success stories are increasing every day. In several cases, impressive financial benefits have been recorded, whereas in a few organizations, the implementation of this methodology has not given the expected benefits.
Some experts of chaotic dynamics and complexity have pointed out the paradoxical nature of TQM, with the simultaneous focus on control and learning. I agree with them. This may be cause of many difficulties of the application of TQM concept in practice.
I would like to say something about the Japanese business philosophy Kaizen.
Total Quality Management is a system initially designed to implement the Japanese business philosophy Kaizen, that covers three basic principles:
• human resources are the most important company asset,
• processes must evolve by gradual improvement rather than radical changes,
• improvement must be based on statistical/quantitative evaluation of process performance.
From its appearance until today, Total Quality Management in Japan was more of a philosophy than a formal process. One way or another, the Kaizen philosophy is embedded into each human activity in Japan. When applied to the workplace, Kaizen means continual improvement involving everyone - managers and workers alike.
Kaizen has often been translated as “cutting”, the process when a rough diamond is gradually polished into a high quality gem. The culture of gem cutting is very important, as per an old saying that “the gem cannot be polished without friction...” For example, taking someone’s idea and then polishing it yourself is not considered plagiarism. Moreover, it is even considered a recognition in one’s environment.
The Japanese are so obsessed with high quality that they almost “celebrate” when they find an error, since it serves them as an additional incentive for further improvements. The well-known Deming’s “zero defect” philosophy, and zero defect production, applied, for example, in the car industry has led to a multi-decade sales growth of Japanese cars in the U.S. market. Although they have faced severe problems in that segment recently, they have done their best to remove faults and regain clients’ trust despite many troubles caused by natural disasters. Due to the crucial role of quality management, many Japanese companies have become competitively superior to their U.S. and European competitors. Japan’s strong international competitiveness is rooted in strong competition among Japanese companies both in the domestic (with declining protection) and in the international markets.
Many companies in Japan provide accurate measurement of their employees’ productivity, but managers receive only aggregate measurements. This is aimed at emphasizing production as representing team work. Managers use aggregate values to improve systems, yet employees are not pressurized into improving their own productivity. An analysis of planning and decision-making in Japan gives a much clearer picture. Japanese managers have a mostly long-term orientation unlike their U.S. counterparts. If planning is defined as the determining of the purpose and objectives of the organization as a whole or its individual parts, and select means for attaining these objectives, we will see that it requires decision-making.
The decision making in a Japanese organization includes several levels. In a typical organization, several levels are involved in making the decision. Actually, the most important part of the process is to understand and analyze the problem and then develop various alternate solutions. The final authority for making a decision still rests with top management, but before a proposal reaches the executive’s desk, the problem and the possible solutions have been discussed at various levels in the organizational hierarchy. Top management still has the option to accept or reject a decision. But it is more likely that a decision is returned to subordinates for further study, rather than being rejected outright.
The proposal is confirmed through the Ringi process. The Ringi-Sho is a proposal document prepared by a staff member. This paper is circulated among various managers before it goes to top management for formal approval. The document, which is usually initialed by those involved in or affected by the decision, elicits cooperation and participation of many people. This, in turn, assures that the problem or the decision is examined from different perspectives. That this decision making process is time-consuming is obvious. But after a consensus is reached, the implementation of the plan is rather swift because the understanding of the plan, the clarification of the problem, the evaluation of the different alternatives, and the involvement of those people who will implement the decision, is certain. But the sharing of the decision making power and responsibilities can also result in a problem in that no one feels individually responsible for the decision.
A characteristic of the Japanese approach is that it is constructed to recommend constant work on developing existing knowledge on processes. This is important for continuous work on process development. Each time a team or an individual analyze their processes, these are improved and the effects monitored, so more is learned about them and that leads to further improvements.
It is the same as the entire Japanese economy with its powerful companies which provoke curiosity worldwide, and even small Japanese companies have been attracting serious international attention as well. The economic environment is still changing, technological development knows no boundaries, markets demand better quality, and consumers are becoming more and more demanding.
These show, as claimed by the Nagoya University professor Eiji Ogawa, that “Today’s know-how for success does not necessarily guarantee tomorrow’s business prosperity”, which means that all economic agents are in constant, relentless and endless market competition. Recent occasional quality problems with some Japanese car manufacturers are the best evidence of this, but problems are still resolved so that client satisfaction is the primary concern, no matter what the cost.
One key requirement for TQM to work successfully is the buy-in and total endorsement from all players, departments and groups involved with the process/product. Training is an important ingredient here as well as clear communication. Another key factor is believing that quality improvement is an ongoing process and thus never be satisfied with the status quo.
Dear colleagues,
William M. Hayden Jr.
Srini Vasan Radoica Luburić Ravindra Bankar Vadivel S M Alam KhanI see from your answers to this question, you pointed out that the main reason of TQM failed is bad management support. My question regarded to situation when there is full management support to TQM but results of applying TQM are bad
Philip Crosby, a quality guru, said: "The problem of quality management is not what people don't know about it. The problem is what they think they do know".
TQM is a concept rather than a system that could be implemented.
In my perspective, there are many commercial names for one thing that must be focused which is "IMPROVEMENT"!
To achieve improvement, there are many difficulties which are commonly related to resistance to change.
To Mr. Mohamed Salaheldin ,
There are many firms in which TQM is successfully applied. But there are others where that is not case. Causes for it are different.Question is refers to that situations.
To Mr. William M. Hayden Jr.
,I agree with you.People are always the problem.However, in this case there is
something yet. What do you think about potential paradox in TQM? Simultaneously control and learning.
Control is equated with the traditionally way of thinking (mechanistic-Newtonian paradigm).From the other side, organisational learning is equated with the complexity paradigm (theory of chaos and complexity). These paradigms are, in many things, contrary to each other.
Kind regards.
To Mr. Dragoljub Šarović
I still mean it, TQM is not a system to be implemented, it may be an approach or concepts to be applied through any framework to reach the main target of IMPROVEMENT
TQM is somehow a legacy system!
Operation excellence or even QMS could be better names for TQM
Anyway the main difficulties are always the CULTURE
Regards
To Mr.William M. Hayden Jr.
,Thank you for sharing these items.
All the best.
To Mr.William M. Hayden Jr.
,I'm interested in "Missing Ingredient For Success:"
Kind regards.
While the attached article is somewhat dated I believe many of the findings continue to inhibit the utilization of TQM and stall its potentials.
Enjoy the journey.
BTW if it does not open it can be found on my Researchgate site.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1079959.pdf
Conference Paper Why TQM programmes fail? A pathology approach
I hope this two articles help to find the challenges ... Dragoljub Šarović
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