30 Key Factors for Total Quality Management in Business
Process Control and Total Quality Management
To talk about Total Quality Management, we have to start by addressing the enormous resources that a company loses when management fails to uphold excellence in quality processes, products, and services.
Studies by various researchers and gurus such as Deming, Juran, Feigenbaum, and Ishikawa, indicate that waste due to lack of quality averages around 25 to 35 percent of total turnover. The lack of quality is one of the main reasons for generating numerous other types of waste, created by the need to meet or exceed the shortcomings in terms of failures and errors.
Given the figures set out above, the enormous potential for improvement in terms of revenue and profits is quite clear for companies that improve their quality standards, and are able to generate products and services “right the first time”, not only for external customers but also for internal ones.
Improved quality means increased productivity levels and, consequently, reduced production costs, but also the company’s overall costs, increasing competitiveness both for the highest quality and lower costs. The company has the possibility of offering high value (higher quality at lower prices) or earning through a price “premium” resulting from a high level of quality and design.
When quality is no longer just a matter of complying with the specifications, but also to take due account, as mentioned earlier, the quality of processes, but without neglecting the quality of customer service, quality of the working environment, environmental quality, and safety of workers, consumers, and the community at large.
Thus, total quality is something that covers everything, both in processes and in areas and sectors. Total quality implies an ethical commitment to excellence, which means a zeal for continuous improvement of products and processes.
It is impossible to generate quality outside of the company without first generating quality inside of it. Improved leadership, training, production processes, prevention and evaluation systems, recruitment and personnel management, security, and internal communication are some of the crucial factors for a company to be highly competitive and overcome its opponents. Only internal excellence generates a feasible position in the minds of users as a provider of products and services with high added value.
Because quality meets the ethics of management and labor, managers choose freely to do good things (activities, processes, and products or services) or make them wrong. It involves them as a reward to increase sales, reduce costs, improve the quality of life in the company, and make possible their survival in the medium and long term. Failure to do so, or choosing to do things wrong or just more or less, means the generation of problems in terms of satisfaction of consumers or users, consequently loss of competitiveness and market share, loss of preference and loyalty of customers and consumers, and of course, serious financial problems.
Financial problems are the result of bad management, and bad management is a reflection of the lack of quality in production, services, recruitment and training of personnel, design, and credit management, among others.
That is why, once again, we stress that when it comes to total quality, it refers to every aspect of the organization.
It is no use having the best product if it does not have the best distribution or the best customer service. What good is having a good design if it does not have good production processes and excellent input suppliers?
Building the best product at a cost that cannot be borne by the market does not help much.
Quality involves taking into consideration the wishes and needs of consumers, internal (within the meaning of the process) and external (in terms of products and services offered). It also means continuous improvement. And this continuous improvement does not accept the lack of adaptation to new demands. That’s why continuous improvement leads to overall quality.
As the title says one of the major works of management in recent times, companies must strive for excellence. Only excellence in management will allow them to offer higher quality more efficiently.
Thirty key factors that an organization must take into consideration if it is to achieve Total Quality. These are the critical issues that will be developed below.
1. Commitment of Top Management
Top management must be fully aware of the importance of strategic and operational quality, to which they should be fully engaged in both aspects of leadership and planning, such as those related to training, continuous improvement of processes, and systems prevention and assessment to enable the highest level of quality and satisfaction. This means devoting all resources necessary to make quality possible, whether resources are both financial and time commitment.
2. Teamwork
The implementation of a teamwork system aimed at solving problems and creating solutions is one way to achieve active and committed people who are closest to the problems, which makes effective use of their knowledge and experiences, and leads a team which, apart from generating synergy, allows for faster implementation of solutions. A highly competitive business is inconceivable without the existence of teamwork, and above all, without Quality Control Circles¹. It should always be borne in mind that “there is no participation without commitment” and the best way to encourage participation is through teamwork.
3. Measuring Quality
Quality control must be based on facts and not mere estimates. Defining and achieving complete specifications, determining the control points, the elements or aspects to be measured, determining the means or systems used for measuring, and training the people responsible for it are crucial to take into consideration. The system and media to be used must meet standards of accuracy and precision.
One of the key tools for measuring quality lies in the monitoring and analysis of quality costs.
4. Correction of Problems
It involves arriving at the various root causes of the various disadvantages to overcome the effects of acting in a way the real causes of problems and not on symptoms or immediate or superficial causes.
Knowing to ask five or more times in succession the “why?” of each situation or problem exists, leads to the root cause and thereby gives a definitive solution to it. Great quality teachers Imai, Ohno, and Karatsu warrant, and the results are clearly in sight, just need to observe the quality of Japanese products.
5. Quality Committee
The quality issue is important enough, which is why it requires the existence of a committee specially for that sole purpose, in order to monitor the implementation of the system of total quality management, further development, and continuous improvement processes and levels of quality and satisfaction achieved.
6. Training and Education
Total quality begins and ends with education. When it comes to quality, we are talking about total quality in all sectors and activities or business processes, as such, we can realize that it means, yes or yes, quality training for all company personnel, including all managers. No matter what their rank or functional area, everyone must understand the meaning of quality, its importance, and how to make it happen and make it better every day.
Training is an essential foundation for achieving total quality and is one of the pillars of power tools and preventive. Increasing resources for prevention decreases more than proportional costs for internal and external failures. For this reason, training becomes a key concern in managing quality.
7. Improvement Objectives
Planning for continuous improvement accompanied by benchmarking activity allows new goals to achieve in terms of quality, productivity, costs, and delivery times. Improving quality is reducing waste, generating more sales, and increasing profitability. For this reason, the use of “reverse analysis” permits, based on the objectives of profitability, to know what quality standards must be met to make them feasible. They should then set the time and resources to achieve these objectives.
8. Prevention of Defects
Training, like the Poka-Yoke², ³ Negative Analysis, and Statistical Process Control (SPC) are essential tools for quality assurance. Acting preventively and not in reaction to the emergence of the problems is the key issue when Total Quality Management is all about. Ensuring quality ahead of the facts and taking steps to prevent its occurrence, identifying the factors that make the quality and compliance monitoring, permit processes, and make possible fault-free products.
9. Rewards and Recognition
In terms of awards, they must be comprehensive, so as to avoid competition between individuals or groups. What matters is the functioning of the system as a whole and not just parts of it. When it comes to suggestions, which produces an award for the idea and not those who put it into practice, the latter will have no more interest in this idea succeeding. However, if it is awarded both the generation and those who put it into practice, it creates an atmosphere of “win-win.” Those who will have to implement their best ideas to succeed, encouraging peers to generate ideas, since all will benefit from them.
10. Proceedings of the Quality Program
Implement tools and methods conducive to preventing the occurrence of errors and failures. Prioritize “source control” and the use of Poka-Yoke.
11. Growth with Profitability
Costs incurred in prevention and evaluation, in addition to being fixed, should be considered as investments. Increasing prevention means less need for evaluation, but overall a significant drop in costs for internal and external failures. To the extent that production increases, fixed costs per unit decrease, an increase that is driven by increased sales due to excellence in quality and lower prices.
A policy and planning focused on prevention activities generate significant increases in profitability. A very useful tool when prevention is gestating in the implementation of the Internal Control Matrix System.
12. Customer Needs
Real quality is only feasible when taking into consideration the needs and desires of customers and consumers. Designing and producing something that does not need or does not value the consumer lacks quality.
Performing quality is taken into account what the customer understands as quality for a given product or service. Only then is the company able to generate real added value.
13. Planning Process
Planning for quality, or taking with due consideration to quality planning, is the key issue of this point. If quality is invading all areas, activities, and processes of the organization, it is essential that this takes into account the quality of each of the key functions of the administrative process, the first of the functions of planning.
Planning conceived as the selection of missions and objectives, strategies, policies, programs, and procedures to achieve, quality should be a point of reference. When it comes to quality objectives, ISO 9004 defines quality objectives as key elements of quality such as fitness for use, function, safety, and reliability.
14. Strategic Planning
Total quality is the way to excellence, and the latter is the strategic objective of any company that intends to be competitive and win the position in the minds of consumers.
For these reasons, it is essential that quality is one of the central elements of strategic planning. Only when quality is part of the vision, mission, goals, values, and policies of the company, will it be feasible to achieve a total commitment throughout the organization, its suppliers, and distributors to Total Quality.
15. Quality Culture
The behavior of managers, the policy of the company, and the transcendent values of the organization should avoid contradictions that “torpedo” the plans and strategic and operational objectives of the company.
Owning a quality culture implies that the entire organization understands the critical importance of this for the survival and competitiveness of it. Achieving a culture of quality means that all members of the company are real and truly inseparable from continuous improvement and the generation of added value for customers.
16. Total Systems Approach
Understanding, thinking, and focusing the company as a system is the great secret to total quality. Understanding that the whole exceeds the sum of its parts, and a component or factor, whether human or material, is as good as the system, are concepts that both managers and employees must understand and be able to comprehend. It will not do the sum of many employees “stars” if the conflict between them or their particular way of being, generate lower results adding that the organization that individuals inclined to teamwork produce optimal results.
Nor can it be overlooked that many times we can constantly change employees, suppliers, or machinery, and although it does improve performance, because the system generates poor results remain unchanged. Bad policy, planning errors, and lack of trust between employees and managers prevent improving operating results.
17. Communication of Information
Effective information systems are essential and efficient when it comes to monitoring, analyzing, and improving standards of quality, productivity, and satisfaction. ¹¹Scorecard, Andon²², ³Visual Management, are some of the practical and creative elements available to keep all staff and managers aware of the process operation.
18. Quality Policy
They make the best management of the company in its pursuit of excellence. Managers and leaders must be perfectly clear where it should be reached and how to achieve it. Without clear and precise ideas, employees will not know what to expect. Clear policies and contradictory relations with suppliers, hiring, training, and investment in training, and systems of rewards and punishments are fundamental in achieving total quality.
19. Mission and Vision
Having well-defined what the company is involved in and where you want to be within a long term used to define the strategic objectives in terms of quality. Without a clear view, it is difficult to have leadership and consistent support of the followers. A vision of high value will serve to enhance the strength of inspiration and leader.
20. Constancy and Planning for Competitiveness
Quality is designed and produced, not controlled. It is a way of affirming rightly the crucial importance of planning and allowing elements to a standardization of both processes and products and services. Quality should never be owned by an individual but of the organization. When the quality of an individual depends on the organization, it will lose quality when it loses. The quality should depend on the proper functioning of the system, not the capabilities of one or more individuals. This thinking also makes the organization and total quality as a system.
21. Monitoring Methods
The monitoring methods and systems have changed radically. Groups tend to be self-directed, so that supervisors can control a larger number of staff, focus their efforts on being a facilitator and inspirer of Quality Circles, engage in activities with greater creativity and innovation, so improve the quality of products and processes. Their behavior must stop being reactive, to give priority to a preventive and proactive approach.
22. Interaction Between Departments
The interplay between the various departments is fundamental to reducing costs, as well as in improving the timing and response times. Better horizontal communication faster and easier resolution of problems, further improving management processes.
It’s time to break down the walls, allowing real teamwork of the organization as a whole. There is no place for “clans” or “tribes.” Departments and their members play for one team is the company.
23. Control of Suppliers
It should end the practice of purchasing goods or services on the basis of the lowest price, it is necessary to evaluate the total cost for which must be taken into consideration the quality of products, improvement plans, medium and long term participation providers in the design of products, services, and processes, frequency, and volume of deliveries among others.
Possess first-tier suppliers reduces the cost of inspection, since there are no checks on content, quality, and quantity can receptionist inputs and parts directly to assembly lines or production.
24. Quality Audit
Operational and Internal Audits should focus their efforts on improving the quality of the organization as a whole, for which they will be responsible for monitoring compliance with established standards, as well as policies established quality.
It will not be limited to prevent embezzlement if you are losing customers by poor attention, or the disappointing levels of satisfaction. Losing customers means losing the main capital of the company, losing sales and future customers (due to negative word-of-mouth advertising). Never forget that the cost of getting a new customer exceeds the cost of retaining a current one.
25. Process Control
Defining standards, assessing compliance with them, and further improvement planning form the distinctive features of process control. Statistical Process Control is the ultimate weapon, and therefore the understanding of this part of managers and employees is crucial. One might wonder how many companies today have implemented Statistical Process Control.
26. Product Design
Concentrating efforts at the time of designing the product or service has consequences and implications of great magnitude in the subsequent processing and processing costs. Increasing time and resources in this work generates further significant reductions in cost and failure.
27. Commitment to Continuous Improvement
The implementation stage of Plan-Do-Assess and Act (PREA), constitute the essence of the improvement process established by the System and Kaizen Philosophy. Continuous improvement is one of the cornerstones of “Lean Production”, which allows a continuous decrease in waste (sets).
28. Creativity and Innovation
Make creativity and innovation permanent sources of improvement in products, services, and processes. The organization must make creativity a way to solve and prevent problems, new needs, and requirements of internal and external customers.
For these reasons, management must remove obstacles and barriers to creativity and innovation, creating an environment for fertilization and development.
29. Ethics as a Key and Determining Factor
Without ethics, there is no quality. Real quality services and products require the highest ethical standards by management and employees. Ethics in business and work ethic is what is seen as key factors in business excellence.
Respect for employees, consumers, and the community, are the foundation on which to build businesses that generate high added value in every sense of the term.
30. Recognize the Factors of Organizational Behavior
Quality requires leadership, ethics, training, and planning among other key factors. But no time to recognize the psychological, sociological, political, anthropological, and psychosocial which they are exposed human relationships and behaviors, it would ruin any attempt to achieve Total Quality. This is where Organizational Development and correct group dynamics come alive and are of vital importance to the future of the company.
Conclusions
No quality without ethics. Ethics is the basis of quality. The ethical commitment leads to entrepreneurs who adopt a search endlessly generate the highest quality work environment for employees and workers, the highest quality products and services for its customers and consumers, and higher quality for the community.
Besides the ethical question, the same healthy selfishness of which we spoke Adam Smith, must lead the business within a trial to seek more rational overall quality for the purpose of increasing their profits, and that by generating less waste quality increase the satisfaction of their staff and so increase their levels of productivity, increase customer satisfaction and users, while generating and thanks to all this a strong competitive advantage for the company and its brands.
From the aforesaid it is clear that ethics is profitable for the firm, which mobilizes all its human components in the pursuit of excellence, which is based on the philosophy of continuous improvement.
If each company seeks to continuously improve its products and processes, improving quality, reducing costs, and increasing productivity, it contributes not only to their own competitive capacity but creates the synergy with other companies in an environment of economic growth, which is supported by all healthy economy by increasing productivity levels.
Total quality is something that not only should matter to the individual employer should be subject to interest from the business chambers, universities, governments, politicians, consumers, and even journalism. Quality is the basis of productivity, and this is the real engine of economic development, which is above mere economic growth. This has been understood and understand countries like Japan or the United States, where total quality is a matter of state.