Total Quality Management (TQM)
TQM makes quality everyone's job, not just an inspection team's, and drives it through continuous small improvement cycles rather than one-off fixes.
A loop of four arrows chases itself round, plan into do, do into check, check into act, and back to plan.
Reach for this when…
- Defects keep recurring because they're fixed once and never traced to a cause.
- Quality is treated as one department's job instead of everyone's.
- You want a discipline for continuous improvement, not another one-off project.
How to run it
- Get visible commitment from leadership - TQM dies if it's delegated downward and forgotten upward.
- Train every employee to spot and flag quality issues in their own work.
- Run the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle: plan a change, try it small, check the result, act on what you learn.
- Use data, not opinion, to decide what to fix next.
- Repeat relentlessly - TQM is a discipline, not a project with an end date.
A worked example
Situation. Siriporn Boonmee managed quality at Suksa Medical, a surgical-gown manufacturer in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where the same stitching defect was blamed on different shifts every month without ever being fixed.
Applied. She ran a PDCA cycle with the machine operators themselves - plan a change to the seam-check step, trial it on one line, check the defect rate, then act by rolling out or adjusting.
Result. The defect rate on that seam fell by more than half in six weeks, and operators started raising other issues unprompted because they'd seen one of theirs actually get fixed.
The catch
TQM can calcify into paperwork and audits that measure compliance rather than quality. It also assumes staff have both the time and the standing to raise issues honestly - in a blame culture, the data feeding it will simply be wrong.
If frontline staff are punished for flagging defects, TQM will just teach them to stop flagging defects.
Origin: W. Edwards Deming; Joseph Juran