Page 64 - The Handbook for Quality Management a Complete Guide to Operational Excellence

50 B u s i n e s s - I n t e g r a t e d Q u a l i t y S y s t e m s A p p r o a c h e s t o Q u a l i t y 51

• Business results What the organization is achieving in relation to its
planned business objectives and in satisfying the needs and expecta-
tions of everyone with a financial interest or stake in the organization.

Total Quality Management (TQM)
The common thread in the evolution of quality management is that atten-
tion to quality has moved progressively further up in the organizational
hierarchy. Quality was first considered the responsibility of the line
worker, then the inspector, then the supervisor, the engineer, the middle
manager and, in TQM, upper management.
In many ways, TQM is difficult to encapsulate, primarily because it
was never clearly defined industry-wide. For some, it provided a frame-
work for continuous improvement and an abundance of tools; for others, a
philosophy of value to society; to others, more of the same experiences of the
American post-war quality movement, repackaged under a different name.
Many organizations that implemented TQM were disappointed with
the results (The Economist, 1992). A survey of 500 American manufacturing
and service companies found that only a third felt their total-quality pro-
grams were having a “significant impact” on their competitiveness. A simi-
lar study in Britain revealed that only one-fifth of the 100 firms surveyed
believed that their quality programs had produced any tangible benefits.
In contrast, a General Accounting Office (GAO) survey of 20 of the
highest scoring applicants for the 1988 and 1989 Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award found (Mendelowitz, 1991):

Companies that adopted quality management practices experienced an overall
improvement in corporate performance. In nearly all cases, companies that used total
quality management practices achieved better employee relations, higher productiv-
ity, greater customer satisfaction, increased market share, and improved profitability.
What accounts for the differences in the results? There are a number of
factors that seem to be related to success and failure:
Failure is likely if the techniques of TQM are implemented without a
commitment to the underlying philosophy. TQM is a customer-focused,
process-driven activity, yet many of the firms that experienced failures
were not focused on customers and devoted too much resource to study-
ing internal processes, or teaching quality tools to employees who rarely
had the opportunity to use them.
TQM is a companywide activity. Those firms that approached TQM by
beefing up their quality departments sent the wrong message. Successful
TQM disperses the responsibility for quality to those outside of the quality
department. It’s likely a well-defined functional hierarchal organization
structure severely hampered attempts to disperse quality throughout the
organization.

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