Principles of Total Quality Management (Essay Sample)

Total Quality Management
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Total quality management
Total quality management is an approved management approach that uses continuous feedback to improve continuously improve an organization’s products and services. Total quality management seeks to achieve the doing of things right the first time over and over again (Kim, G. 2016). Total quality management can also be defined as a continuous process of detecting and eliminating errors, streamlining supply chain management, improving customer service and also ensuring that employees are properly trained. Its focus is to improve the quality of organizational outputs by continuous improvement of internal processes. This paper seeks to explain the relationship between total quality management and the performance of an organization.
Principles of Total Quality Management
Leadership is one of the most important principles of total quality management. This is because the total quality management philosophy derives its strength from senior management commitment in the implementation of total quality management in different organizational processes. Leadership plays a key role in the establishment of a clear vision for the organization, development of common values at all levels of the organization, building trust and eliminating fear, supporting personnel with the required resources, training and motivating employees, encouraging open communication and showing their commitment to quality by leading with example. When senior management is committed to quality in an organization, the employees will also be committed to it thus improving the overall performance of an organization (Kim, G. 2016).
Another total quality management principle is customer focus where an organization focuses on the needs of their customers. For an organization to be successful, it must understand the current and future needs of its customers, achieve their needs and keep working to exceed the expectations of their customers. The way to achieve this is through research to understand all the customer needs and expectations in terms of products, services, price and also reliability. While focusing on the customer needs it is also important for organizations to pay attention to the needs of their employees. This is because when the needs of the employees are not being met in an organization, it will be difficult for them to perform well in their work and this will lead to poor performance by an organization. An organization should also come up with ways to measure customer satisfaction as this will help them to know whether or not they are achieving their goals in terms of customer experience (Kim, G. 2016).
Participation by everyone in the implementation of total quality management is also crucial. This is because when everyone is involved in implementation, there is better teamwork and flow of communication which leads to overall good performance in an organization. To achieve participation by everyone, organizations can use work teams, look for opportunities to improves employee competencies, taking employee suggestions and also focusing on employee motivation and loyalty. This makes employees feel appreciated and they can go about their work feeling confident thus helping organizations to achieve good results and thus performance.
Fact-based management is also an important principle of total quality management because an organization can fail or succeed because of the quality of its decision making. Since effective decisions are made on data analysis, it is important for organizations to emphasize on collection of facts which include data and figures (Kim, G. 2016). The data collected should be accurate and valid and also be easily accessible to management and other stakeholders. Making decisions based on logical analysis helps an organization to achieve success.
A major component of total quality management is continuous improvement. Continuous improvement leads to improved and better-quality processes within an organization. Under continuous improvement, organizations find new ways and techniques to produce better quality products, production is more competitive and organizations can exceed customer expectations. Continuous improvement is meant to ensure an organization uses its resources efficiently