Total Quality Management (TQM) Implementation Guide

Posted on Oct 16, 2024 in Computers

Evolution & Scope of the QA Concept

A. Inspection-Oriented Assurance

Initially, quality assurance (QA) was heavily focused on inspection. Japan banned defective products, while the West and Hong Kong equated QA with inspection. This stemmed from the assumption that strict supervision of workers was necessary, leading to the creation of independent inspection divisions. The authority of inspectors increased, as did the percentage of inspectors compared to line workers (1-5% in Japan, 15% in the West).

Problems:

1. Inspection required extra personnel, leading to decreased productivity and increased costs.
2. Inspection alone couldn’t assure quality, especially for complex assembled products relying on reliability tests.
3. Responsibility for QA rested solely on inspectors.
4. Information feedback from inspection divisions to manufacturing was too slow.
5. Conceptual barriers arose due to statistical sampling with Acceptable Quality Levels (AQLs), hindering the pursuit of higher quality.

B. Process Control

This approach emphasized building quality into each process by studying process capabilities and ensuring products met quality standards through manufacturing process control. It expanded to include suppliers and subcontractors.

Problems:

1. Didn’t address product use by consumers: differing conditions, misuse, miscommunication, misinterpretation of quality information, and customer requirements.
2. Production/inspection didn’t solve problems occurring in design, development, management, and communication processes.
3. Process control was necessary, but QA should begin at the planning and development stages from a systems perspective.

C. Emphasis on Overall Quality Management System

This approach focuses on the entire quality management system, encompassing steps from marketing and new product planning to design, prototyping, testing, subcontracting, purchasing, process design, trial production, regular production, marketing, distribution, and after-sales service. It requires tightly conducted and assured procedures, documentation, and evaluation. Adequate quality analysis (identifying customer requirements and evaluating quality) is performed before manufacturing, building QA into the entire product and process lifecycle.

Components of a QA System

A QA system defines all activities and responsibilities associated with quality through policies and procedures. It should be documented to provide clarity, ensuring different personnel understand their own and others’ responsibilities. This documentation serves as a baseline for auditing and making improvements to the system, and as a basis for training personnel in quality functions. A QA system should have specific objectives, planned and correct procedures, and be implemented effectively to achieve those objectives. Different components/subsystems are designed and implemented to form integral parts of a typical QA system. Major components include quality policy and objectives, inspection systems, calibration systems, non-conformance systems, corrective action systems, quality performance reporting systems, and prevention systems.

Third-Party Registration & Certification

Third-party schemes are part of the original development of ISO 9000. Certification serves as a benchmark for an organization’s QA system. ISO 9000 is a globally recognized quality system standard due to its widespread acceptance and serves as a basic qualification for selecting quality suppliers in international business.

Changing Customer-Supplier Relationships:

There’s a growing trend towards larger manufacturers and smaller suppliers, leading to closer relationships (including virtual incorporation of parts of administrative and control systems). This is evident in two areas: the use of Electronic Data Interchange and the adoption of compatible Quality Management Systems (QMS). For suppliers to respond to customer QMS demands, both operate under a common international standard, ISO 9000. This standard is being globally enforced downwards from large manufacturers to suppliers and sub-suppliers.

Third-Party Audit Concept:

In a two-party system, the supplier develops a QA system conforming to the ISO 9000 standard, and the customer audits the system for acceptance. This system involves both the supplier and customer participating in multiple audits, which is costly. It should be replaced by a third-party registration system.

ISO 9000 quality system registration involves assessment and periodic adequacy audits by a third-party registrar. If the system conforms to the registrar’s interpretation of the ISO 9000 standard, a certificate of registration is issued to the supplier. This registration assures potential customers that the supplier has a well-monitored quality system, eliminating the need for multiple audits.

ISO 9000 Quality Strategy

(Picture: TQM Implementation vs. Time Chart)

The Quality Wheel (PDCA) on the ISO 9000 staircase leads to Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), uplifting quality levels and requirements.

Deming’s 14 Points

Deming’s 14 points are essential for businesses to survive and remain competitive. They can shape new attitudes towards work and create a work environment that fosters continuous improvement.

1. Constancy of Purpose: Focus on continuous quality improvement to remain competitive.
2. New Philosophy: Embrace change, learn responsibilities, take leadership for change, and don’t accept delays, mistakes, or defective materials and workmanship.
3. Cease Dependence on Mass Inspection: Build quality into the product/process from the start.
4. End the Practice of Awarding Business on Price Tag Alone: Minimize total cost by working with a single supplier for each item, building long-term relationships based on loyalty and trust.
5. Improve Constantly and Forever: Continuously improve the system of production and service to increase quality and productivity while reducing costs.
6. Institute Training on the Job: Implement modern training methods.
7. Institute Leadership: Overhaul supervision to help people and machines do a better job.
8. Drive Out Fear: Create an environment where everyone can work effectively for the company.
9. Break Down Barriers Between Departments: Encourage teamwork to foresee and solve problems.
10. Eliminate Slogans, Exhortations, and Targets: Avoid asking for zero defects without providing the necessary methods.
11. Eliminate Work Standards and Numerical Quotas: Don’t manage by objectives (MBO) or numbers. Substitute both with leadership.
12. Remove Barriers to Pride of Workmanship: Restore pride in work.
13. Institute a Vigorous Program of Education and Training: Encourage continuous learning.
14. Take Action to Accomplish the Transformation: Establish a structure that implements these 13 points daily. Transformation requires company-wide commitment and action.

Deadly Diseases

(Picture)

Major obstacles to implementing Deming’s philosophy include lack of constancy of purpose, preoccupation with short-term profits, reliance on visible figures, performance appraisals, and managerial job mobility.

Juran Trilogy

(Picture: Cost of Poor Quality as a Percentage of Operating Budget vs. Time)

Quality Planning (QP) | Quality Control (QC): During operations, the cost of poor quality is around 20% (original zone of QC and chronic waste, representing opportunities for improvement). This can spike to 40% sporadically. Quality improvement (QI) can reduce it to 5%, establishing a new zone of QC around 5%.

Usual Company Effectiveness of Implementing the Trilogy

Self-assessment by managers and prevailing processes often reveal weaknesses in quality planning, strong quality control, and weak quality improvement.

Common Teachings of Quality Gurus

Though approaches differ in techniques, emphasis, and application, the common thrust is continuous improvement. The objective is the same: continuous improvement of every output. This involves removing unwanted variation and improving underlying work processes.

Map Between Product/Service Offering & Customer Needs

(Picture: Circles and Squares)

Situation 1: Increased conformity, decreased offering without defining faults (Marketing issue).

Situation 2: Decreased conformity, increased offering with defined faults (Production issue).

Quality as a Moving Target: Kano Model

(Picture: Customer Satisfaction vs. Requirement Satisfaction with three curves)

Unspoken but Expected Requirements: Known to experienced users and designers, typically rediscovered during lessons learned analysis.

Spoken and Expected Requirements: Easily identified performance-related requirements.

Innovation “Exciter”): Quickly become expected.

Customer Satisfaction

A company’s most important asset is its customers. Satisfied customers pay promptly, improving cash flow (the organization’s lifeblood). Satisfied customers bring future business, sustaining income.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

QFD is a set of graphically oriented planning matrices for decisions affecting any phase of the product development cycle.

Basic Idea:

• Customer Attribute: Rust-resistant.
• Engineering Characteristic: No visible exterior rust in 3 years.
• Part Characteristic: Paint weight = 2.5 gm/m², crystal size: 3 max.
• Process Operation: Dip tank 3 coats.
• Production Requirement: Time: 2 minutes, acidity: 15-20, temperature: 48-55°C.

House of Quality (HOQ):

1. Customer Requirements (WHATs).
2. Technical Requirements (HOWs).
3. Planning Matrix.
4. Interrelationship Matrix (Weight -> How).
5. Prioritized Technical Requirements.
6. Correlation Matrix (Left, Up, Right, Center, Down, Roof).

QFD is a tool that transforms customer needs into design specifications. It’s a design documentation tool that can be incorporated into the ISO 9000 system. Top management support is vital for QFD implementation, as initial requirements increase. Companies should run pilot projects before introducing QFD.

Keys to Successful Quality Improvement Projects

Four specific keys:

1. Understand the problem.
2. Select the right tools.
3. Obtain appropriate numerical and verbal data.
4. Interpret analytical results.

Develop employees’ technical knowledge in day-to-day activities and decision-making. Invest in education, training, and activities required for successful tool use. Maintain active interest in the use of tools and technologies and their results. Delegate responsibility for promoting tools and technologies to people suited to the task.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a measure of the defect capability of a process, with the goal of improvement reaching near perfection. It’s a system of management to achieve lasting business leadership and top performance.

The Six Sigma approach combines statistical methods with quality improvement processes to create a new improvement methodology. Six Sigma is a business improvement approach that seeks to find and eliminate the causes of errors/defects in business processes by focusing on outputs critical to customers.

DMAIC:

• Define: The goal of improvement activities.
• Measure: The existing system.
• Analyze: The system to identify ways to eliminate the gap between current performance and the goal.
• Improve: The system.
• Control: The new system.

DMAIC Steps:

Define: Identify potential projects, evaluate them, select one, prepare the problem and mission statement for the project, and select and launch the project team.

Measure: Identify key parameters and process characteristics. Steps include measuring baseline performance and verifying project needs, documenting the process, planning for data collection, validating the measurement system, and measuring process capability.

Analyze: Analyze past and current performance data to identify causes of variation and process performance. Steps include collecting and analyzing data, developing and testing theories on the source of variation and cause-effect relationships.

Improve: Design remedies, prove their effectiveness, and prepare for implementation. Steps include evaluating alternative remedies, designing experiments to optimize process performance if necessary, proving the effectiveness of remedies, dealing with resistance to change, and transferring remedies to operations.

Control: Design and implement certain activities to hold the gains of improvement. Steps include designing controls and documenting the improved process, validating the measurement system, determining final process capability, implementing and monitoring process control.

Six Sigma Structure:

• Six Sigma Management: Provides direction.
• Master Black Belts: Oversee and guide projects.
• Black Belts: Coach and support team leaders.
• Green Belts: Lead projects to success.
• Teams: Implement improvements.

10 Basic Elements of TQM

1. Leadership
2. Customer Focus
3. Total Employee Involvement
4. Education and Training
5. Teamwork
6. Communication
7. Reward and Recognition
8. Supplier Partnership
9. Performance Measurement
10. Continuous Improvement

1. Leadership: Organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal (doesn’t require formal authority).

2. Customer Focus: Doing the right things the first time for customer satisfaction is a vital TQM concern. In TQM, everyone has a customer and must meet customer requirements, needs, and expectations every time for the organization as a whole to meet external customer needs. The key to successful TQM is focusing on the customer, as the customer is the driver in TQM settings. This applies to both internal and external customers.

Customer analysis involves understanding customer benefits, customer profiles, and market customers.

3. Total Employee Involvement: TQM is an organization-wide change, making everyone responsible. It begins with active leadership from top management and includes efforts to utilize the talents of all employees to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Employees at all levels are empowered to improve output by coming together in new, flexible work structures to solve problems, improve processes, and satisfy customers.

Empowerment Example: Should a machinist be allowed to unilaterally drop a vendor if the vendor delivers substandard material? No. But the machinist should have an avenue to offer input into the matter. A machinist is allowed to change machine setup ways if it improves the process without adversely affecting others and should document the new method as a standard to showcase innovation to others. The better way becomes the standard.

Total Employee Involvement: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

(Picture)

Priority: Physiological (food, clothing, comfort) -> Safety (avoiding risk, harm, pain) -> Social (companionship, acceptance, love and affection, group membership) -> Esteem (responsibility, self-respect, recognition, sense of achievement) -> Self-Actualization (independence, creativity, self-expression, reaching potential).

4. Education and Training: Quality is based on skill and understanding of requirements. Education and training are the best ways to improve people, making them essential to TQM. Through hard work, people can learn to work smart.

5. Teamwork: Internal competition between departments should be focused on quality improvement and external competitiveness. The synergy belief is that there should be no status difference between engineers with theoretical knowledge and workers with practical knowledge, as both are essential. When engineers, technicians, and workers are treated as equals, communication becomes easier for side-by-side work. Synergetic partners get along well with continuous improvement.

Synergy: The result of teamwork (output) is greater than the sum of individual inputs. Advantages include cross-functional/departmental teams. A key TQM concept is promoting collaboration, consensus, creative conflict, and team winning in quality improvement activities.

Collaboration involves a win-win focus and is more effective than dysfunctional competition (win-lose, where the loser has a way of making the price of winning very high for the winner).

Consensus involves dealing with conflicting views to reach substantial agreement among team members, which is better than splitting the team into majority and minority groups.

6. Communication: TQM is a continual activity, requiring communication to all people in the organization and entrenchment in the culture.

7. Reward and Recognition: In the early stages, employees look for management’s true intentions and motives. Teams and individuals applying quality procedures must be recognized and rewarded so the rest of the organization knows what is expected. Failing to recognize successful TQM achievers sends the message that it’s not a good path to job success, possible promotion, and overall personal success.

8. Supplier Partnership: Suppliers and organizations have the same goal: to satisfy the end user. Better supplier quality leads to a better long-term competitive position for the organization due to better quality delivery. Deming emphasized developing partnerships with suppliers for quality because both suppliers and organizations have limited resources. They must work together as partners to maximize the return on their efforts. Both share gains/losses for the final product/service’s success/failure.

9. Performance Measurement: A scientific approach in structured work, decision-making, and problem-solving is vital. Managing by facts is better than relying on gut feelings. Without performance measurement, it’s like captaining an ocean-going ship without instruments.

10. Continuous Improvement:“Good enough is never good enough” Continually strive to improve all business production processes.

(Picture: Quality Performance Level vs. Time)

It’s a never-ending process.

Desired future state -> New… -> … -> Performance excellence.

Current state -> New… -> … -> ….

The quality gap between the current and future state decreases over time.

(Picture: Delta Quality Improvement vs. Delta Time)

Concluding Remarks

Quality Management Elements:

Three Phases of TQM Implementation Practice

TQM Awareness: (Picture: 5 arrows in disorder; a few champions try some quality initiatives).

TQM Preparation: (Picture: 8 arrows in disorder; management tries to organize things better).

TQM Implementation: (Picture: 9 arrows in order; [plan/execute/review/modify] all improvements aim in one well-organized direction).

Performance Excellence:

22-Step TQM Implementation Guideline

1. Increase organizational awareness of TQM.
2. Review the organization’s status of TQM adoption.
3. Confirm management’s commitment to TQM.
4. Create a corporate TQM vision.
5. Form a TQM steering committee.
6. Formulate TQM objectives and strategy.
7. Communicate the TQM campaign.
8. Promote TQM education and training.
9. Identify advocates and resisters.
10. Plan for implementation.
11. Determine improvement projects.
12. Compose project teams.
13. Provide team training.
14. Activate team effort.
15. Obtain team feedback.
16. Obtain customer feedback.
17. Obtain employee feedback.
18. Assess internal business performance.
19. Conduct competitive benchmarking.
20. Benchmark world-class performance.
21. Modify organizational infrastructure.
22. Refine project scope, objectives, and methodology.