Quality Management - Thesis Example

A positive attempt by the organizations concerned to improve structural, infrastructural, attitudinal, behavioral, and methodological ways of delivering to the end customer, with emphasis on consistency, improvements in quality, competitive enhancements, all with the aim of satisfying or delighting the end customer.An overall philosophy whose objective is to meet or exceed the needs of the internal and the external customer by creating an organizational culture in which everyone at every stage of creating the product as well as every level of management is committed to quality and clearly understands its strategic importance.

Both of these definitions have certain common factors. The definition suggests that while the customer is the driving force in TQM, management commitment and customer-focused approach promote cultural and organizational changes necessary for TQM success.Management approach of an organization, centered on quality, based on the participation of all its members and aiming at long-term success through customer satisfaction, and benefits to all members of the organization and to society. Total Quality Management (TQM) is ‘an approach to improving the competitiveness, effectiveness, and flexibility of a whole organization’ which requires planning, organizing, and understanding each activity (O’Neill & Sohal, 1999).

It is a process of continuous improvement (Gonsalves, 2002) in the quality of all processes, people, products, and services of an organization, or it aims to enhance value to customers by designing and continually improving organizational processes and systems (Hill, 2008). "Total quality is the unyielding and continually improving effort by everyone in an organization to understand, meet, and exceed the expectations of customers" (Procter & Gamble, 1992, p. 1 cited by Hoang, 2009).Simple definitions from the American Society for Quality states that quality denotes how well the product or service meets customer specifications, whether stated or implied (James, 2008).

This definition fits the definition of quality manifested in the MBNQA criteria. Quality should be able to meet or exceed customer expectations and the characteristics that help define quality include performance, features, durability, aesthetics, and service quality (Lian, 2001). TQM is thus the management philosophy where every employee in the organization must work towards making improvements in processes so as to be able to meet or exceed customer expectations. Motwani (2001) finds that emphasis on MBNQA is more on achieving customer satisfaction through continuous quality improvement, rather than providing a holistic quality improvement.