Answer to Question #153871 in Management for GGG

Question

How can we applay total quality management in business firm?

Answer 1

Quality management is the act of overseeing all activities and tasks including structure, processes, procedures, and resources that must be accomplished to maintain a desired level of excellence.

TQM can be applied in a firm by;

(i) Ensuring Management’s commitment to quality: Constant improvement of the organisation’s overall performance should be a permanent objective of the organisation. The management must provide the resources to continue quality improvement

(ii) Customer satisfaction: Firms rely on their customers and therefore should understand current and future customer needs must be designed to meet the expectations of customers.

(iii) Preventing rather than detecting defects: Techniques that aim at the prevention of defects rather than the detection of the defects are statistical process control, continuous process improvement and problem solving and system failure analysis must be incorporated.

(iv) Measurement of Quality: Firms must know what current quality levels are i.e. Where we are or where we stand in respect of the quality and what quality levels we are aspiring for or where we are going

v) Improvement: Continuous process of improvement of people, equipment, suppliers, materials and procedures is key focus. Continual improvement of the organisation’s overall performance should be a permanent objective of the organisation.

(vi) Corrective action for root cause: To avoid repetition of problems, identify the root causes for their occurrence and develop means and corrective actions to solve the problems of the root level. Failure analysis and problem-solving skills are very useful techniques in this regard.

(vii) Training: Usually, proper training programmes have to be undertaken to train the employees for the use of total quality management concepts and procedures. Employees have to be provided with time-to-time training for continuous improvement.