TQM Business - About Total Quality Management

What is TQM? I have heard this word tqm thrown around the internet for some time now and I have had no clue as to what it meant. I am interested in management on a cursory level -- meaning, I don't know very much but I try. It turns out, after a minor research project into the subject, that tqm is an acronym that stands for "total quality management".

TQM is a form of quality management in business and production that loosely means, more people having more total quality control over the quality of management, services, communication in the efforts of creating a better quality, more efficiently made product. The tqm definition has been tough to track down threw my research on tqm, or total quality management, because I have come to learn, there is no singular definition of tqm. What is it, this facet about quality management, that is so hard to describe? My journey to learn more about the concept of tqm led me to learn a lot more than I had orginally thought.

Like I said before, as I began my mission of finding out the tqm definition, the more I learned about total quality management the more I realized the more tqm-related questions I had, and thus the more I had to learn. The first quality to learn about quality management is that it is a continuous cycle. Almost every business (that I came across) that implements one form or another of the tqm system uses some kind of custom chart to describe the flow of their total quality management cycle. As you would guess and I'm sure you have seen before, many companies employing tqm use a flowchart, like the one pictured to the right that I discovered from an excellent site (linked below the picture).

They use a very user-friendly tqm flow chart that will probably explain the concept well enough that you can stop reading here if you'd wish, but I will continue on as it is my journey too. Other companies use a circle split into sections of fragments, each piece or slice representing another step in the tqm business model. They make it look so simple, and this was the first helpful piece in my understanding more about quality management and the meaning of tqm, and allowed me to come up with my own tqm list. Typically there are anywhere from four to seven or eight steps in a tqm concept model. Here is what I learned in this first step, listed below. I'm doing it this way because the whole concept of tqm seems like one of those subjects with a lot of information surrounding it, so I want to make a basic list to not overwhelm myself.

1. The first step in my tqm business model is to understand how the QUALITY of your product and services can be measured.
2. The second step in this tqm business model is to improve the EFFICIENCY of production processes.
3. The third step in this tqm model is to design better modes of COMMUNICATION within the workplace.
4. The fourth step in this tqm system is to continue the EVOLUTION of the company, the streamlining of products and service, and work ethics of employees.
5. The fifth step in my tqm business model is to keep the LEADERSHIP in the hands of everyone. Create routes for everyone -- management, employees and customers -- to help the business move into the future and continue to change its quality management goals.

This is obviously just a start. I will be back soon with another chapter as I learn more and more about total quality management.