The Essence of Total Quality Management


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Edward Deming was American scientist that is closely associated with elaboration of Total Quality Management (TQM) . Aim to stimulate production of competitive goods has initiated the creation of TQM . This conception was elaborated as business management strategy aimed at non-stop quality improving of all business processes. The company should increase quality of products, quality of process organizing and level of personnel proficiency.
TQM is guided and controlled team process of unceasing quality improving that drives company to successful goals attainment. It is focused on customer's needs, increasing of company's financial results and employee's work satisfaction. Total Quality Management is systematic, integrated and organized management style that is used by many successful companies in the world. There are 14 management points developed by Edward Deming that were taken as basis for TQM : Create constancy of purposes directed to improving of products and services. Company should distribute resources for long-term planning, researching and educating, besides improving of products design. Adopt new philosophy of quality . Every person in company should accept challenges of quality improving, learn duties and meet the requirements of new philosophy. Products of bad quality should never reach the customers. Organization should accept it as a rule that defects and spoilage can happen on the stage of production, however such low-quality products should never be received by consumers. Cease dependence on final inspection . Mechanism of preventing defects should be build into business processes. Consider total cost, not just initial price. Company should establish long-term relations with selected suppliers. Find problems. Improve constantly. Management and employees should continuously find out ways of quality improvement. Institute on-the-job training. It is necessary to establish regular trainings and education on all levels, especially for new-comers. Institute leadership across the organization. Managers should not only direct what to do and then supervise, but to guide and help as well. Drive out fear. Create comfortable atmosphere of trust and innovation within the company. Employees should feel free to express new ideas. Company's management should be indulgent to employees' failures, when they experiment with innovations. Break down communication barriers between units. Work in teams, this will help to eliminate many problems. Avoid competition between units (departments), but arrange efficient collaboration. Eliminate slogans, targets, exhortations for workers. Appeals to employees to extirpate defects will not work. These things will not help to improve quality, but can disturb employees. Problems with quality and effectiveness are caused by system, not personalities. Eliminate numeric goals. Optimize work according to quality, not just quantity. Quantity goals may entail reports falsifications and decreasing of quality. Encourage pride of workmanship. Eliminate barriers that prevent employees and managers to be proud of their workmanship. Refuse annual attestations of employees work. People cannot work efficiently if the system does not let them do it (if they have poor instruments, poor materials and support, unfounded production quotas, no possibility to discuss ways of work improvement and so on). As a result employee produces low-quality products and cannot be satisfied with his/her workmanship. Encourage education and self-improvement. Engage best specialists to training of employees, form employees' understanding of whole enterprise working process as one organism. Take actions needed to make transformation. Involve all employees to process of company improvement, be ready for transformation, create informational center that will process employees' suggestions and inform everybody about improvement performance.
VIP Task Manager is software for team collaboration and group task management which can be used for purposes of quality management. It can be used for managing and monitoring of team process of quality improving. Such process consists of various smaller processes that can be divided into certain number of tasks that have to be executed, monitored and reported. In this context VIP Task Manager can be used for planning business-processes (to plan what steps(tasks) they should include, in what order they should follow, what documents or operations should be made regarding each step and so on) delegating business-process tasks-lists to executors and tracking if it is performed according to map.		Play Demo
Play Demo	Quality manager can track and collect issues, examine employees, receive and collect ideas and suggestions from employees' side. With a help of VIP Task Manager it is possible to establish efficient collaboration between people working in different departments. Users can plan, edit, track and report their tasks, share their job performance, share documents and files. Task can be planned by various standard and custom attributes, for example by time settings (start and finish dates, due dates, durations, recurrence), by priority (6 levels of priority, from lowest to urgent) and so on. Software makes progress towards project targets visible for everyone and measurable. In order to report about their progress, employees can change task statuses (workflow can be customized according to your needs), change percents of completeness, attach files or links, write short reports in task notes and use comments panel. In order to analyze advancement and state of job performance managers and average team members can build and store printable reports. VIP Task Manager can work in regimes of Task List, Task tree and Scheduler (Calendar view). Read also a new article about process management - Software for project quality management