Total Quality Management and TQM
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organisational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, government, and service industries. Total Quality provides an umbrella under which everyone in the organisation can strive and create customer satisfaction. TQ is a people focused management system that aims at continual increase in customer satisfaction at continually lower real costs (c.f. JIT, Lean and Kaizen).
Quality assurance through statistical methods is a key component in a manufacturing organisation, where TQM generally starts by sampling a random selection of the product. The sample can then be tested for things that matter most to the end users. The causes of any failures are isolated, secondary measures of the production process are designed, and then the causes of the failure are corrected. The statistical distributions of important measurements are tracked. When parts' measures drift into a defined "error band", the process is fixed. The error band is usually a tighter distribution than the "failure band", so that the production process is fixed before failing parts are produced. It is important to record not just the measurement ranges, but what failures caused them to be chosen. In that way, cheaper fixes can be substituted later (say, when the product is redesigned) with no loss of quality. After TQM has been in use, it's very common for parts to be redesigned so that critical measurements either cease to exist, or become much wider.
Often, a "TQMed" product is cheaper to produce because of efficiency/performance improvements and because there is no need to repair dead-on-arrival products, which represents an immensely more desirable product.
