Idea 46 - Total quality management

 Idea 46 - Total quality management

If management is a science, as some have argued, it is an imprecise one and one which encourages an endless flow of management ideas that surface and then, as often as not, sink. Where there has been truly impressive progress is in the realm of quality, where science and maths feel quite at home. Much of the science has come from Americans. But there has been a lot of human insight too, and that has often come from Japan.

 

This powerful combination first reached many Western companies during the early 1980s in the form of 'total quality management' (TQM). This was a synthesis of different ideas and tools that had evolved in Japan since the Second World War. One of its principal architects was a former US census statistician called W. Edwards Deming, who was summoned to Japan in 1947 by the Supreme Command of the Allied occupying powers. They wanted him to do something about the poor levels of Japanese quality - all too apparent in their locally sourced supplies.

 

Deming took Japanese industry in hand, so successfully that he remains something of a demigod, remembered not least in the Deming Award, the most prestigious national annual prize for quality. He compiled a 14-point plan that is a complete management philosophy calling for a culture of improvement and enumerating the ways in which it could be created. One was to 'cease dependence on mass inspection' (the traditional method of quality control) and instead to require statistical evidence that quality was built in. He called for vigorous education and training, the breaking down of barriers between departments and the daily involvement of top management. He also advocated continuous improvement by repeating the POCA cycle - plan (get the data, analyse the problem, plan the solution), do, check (measure the change) and action (modify as necessary).

 

Joseph M. Duran was another strong American influence. 'Quality does not happen by accident', he said. This was the starting point for his 'quality trilogy' of quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. Kaoru Ishikawa, who gave his name to the 'Ishikawa diagram' or 'fishbone' diagram - a quality problem-solving tool- was another important figure in the development of TQM. Armand Feigenbaum first used the term 'total quality control' in a 1951 book, and the 'control' was later corrected to 'management' by Ishikawa.

 

 

Though many elements have been hijacked by later methodologies, TQM as such has fallen from grace. In its heyday it was an entire way of life for the company and had to be led by top management. When it wasn't - which happened often enough among western companies who would pick the bits they liked - it was almost sure to fail, something that contributed to its shrinking popularity. Though it focused on the individual department, it was designed to apply across the company, not merely in production. It viewed quality and the business process from the customer's point of view, though the 'customer' could be someone in the same company, the person you passed your work on to or whose request you fulfilled.

 

 

The Kaizen way TQM had two overriding goals - total customer satisfaction (internal and external), and what later came to be called 'zero defects'. That didn't mean mistakes wouldn't happen, just that the process wouldn't assume a failure rate. The principle of Kaizen- the Japanese equivalent of 'continuous improvement' - was deeply embedded in TQM and seen as the only way to maintain a high rate of customer satisfaction. Among other core principles were that prevention is better than cure, and it is cheaper to design faults out of products; quality involves everyone; and employees have a key role in spotting quality problems and suggesting improvements.

 

 

This last principle produced 'quality circles', another common feature of. TQM and a way of empowering the workforce. Since they go hand in hand with Kaizen, they are sometimes called 'Kaizen teams'. These are groups of people, not too large, who do the same sort of work and meet regularly to solve work-related issues - often using Ishikawa diagrams. Guidelines for quality circles include the following:

 

• They should be voluntary. No one should be press-ganged into joining them.
• They should meet regularly, under the leadership of their supervisor, for about an hour once a week to begin with. The problems they deal with will dictate subsequent frequency.
• They should meet in normal working hours, but away from distractions of the workplace.
• Each meeting should have a clear agenda and goal.
• The circle must be able to call in expert help if it needs it, and should have its own budget.

As TQM flooded into the US, Phil Crosby, a former quality control manager on the Pershing missile project, packaged many of these ideas for an American audience. He coined the term zero defects' and one of his catchphrases was 'do it right the first time'. He also formulated the four absolutes of quality management:

 

• Quality is conformance to requirements.
• Quality prevention is preferable to quality inspection.
• Zero defects is the quality performance standard.
• Quality is measured in monetary terms - the price of non-conformance.

He too thought management had to take prime responsibility for quality and introduced quality circles in the form of 'quality improvement teams', encouraging employees to set their own quality goals. He reckoned that manufacturers spent 20% of their revenues doing things wrong and then doing them again, and that service companies could spend up to 35% of operating expenses in the same way. This was the cost of quality. By spending the money on getting it right, they could recoup those costs even before any additional competitive benefits. So 'quality is free' Crosby used to say, using the title of his 1979 book.

 

 

TQM was good at optimizing existing processes, but less so when dealing with something new. The methodology assumed that better quality was the answer o all problems, yet many elements survive in other systems and some have detected a large part of it coming back into existence in the new IS09001 international manufacturing quality standard.