Understanding Total Quality Management (TQM) and TPM

Posted on Mar 9, 2025 in Business Administration and Management (BAM)

Total Quality Management (TQM)

TQM is an approach to the management of quality that covers all parts and people of an organization to influence and improve the quality of products and services continuously for customers. It examines the interconnections within the organization to set a strategy and develop partnerships with employees and suppliers.

Key Principles of TQM

  1. Quality Emphasis: TQM emphasizes quality as the key performance indicator for improvement, understood as a constant consistency between customer expectations and a firm’s products/services. Higher quality translates to greater effectiveness in attracting and retaining customers, thereby increasing revenue generation.

  2. Quality Management: TQM emphasizes quality management as the combination of quality control, planning, and costing. Firms should continuously improve, measure process costs, and achieve an optimum level of defect management, aiming for zero defects/problems.

  3. Total Engagement: TQM emphasizes the total engagement of the organization. The firm is viewed as a bundle of interconnected processes, all affecting the quality of products and services. Firms must:

    • Identify internal clients.
    • Write service level agreements (SLAs) with internal clients OR develop systematic partnerships.
    • Develop team-working skills.
    • Identify quality leaders and diffuse responsibilities.

TQM requires a strategic engagement: top managers must provide clear plans and resources to sustain its activities. Moreover, they must provide training to employees and support them.

Primary vs. Support Processes

This model suggests a firm can be divided between:

  • Primary processes: Activities that directly generate value/quality for customers.
  • Support processes: Activities that do not generate value visible to the customer but enable primary processes to be effective.

Quality Costs

Firms need to balance the costs of quality failures with the costs of managing prevention and detection mechanisms. Firms strive to minimize quality costs, intended as the sum of all these terms:

  • Prevention costs: Design, implementation, and maintenance of the TQM system.
  • Appraisal/Detection costs: Suppliers’ and customers’ evaluation of purchased materials, processes, products, and services to ensure they conform to specifications.
  • Internal failure costs: The results of work fail to reach designed quality standards and are detected before they are transferred to the customer.
  • External failure costs: The products or services fail to reach design quality standards but are not detected until after transfer to the customer.

Weaknesses and Critical Points of TQM

Some quality management approaches argue that quality initiatives (1) significantly reduce failure costs but also (2) significantly increase quality prevention/appraisal costs. The main claim is that organizations need to invest heavily to set up the TQM system, but afterward, TQM systems become almost self-healing.

Empirical evidence remains controversial, showing that certain quality interventions do generate improvements with limited costs; however, TQM systems can also be very expensive. Poor TQM implementations increase the chance that prevention/appraisal costs increase exponentially, as the organization constantly needs to revise its quality practices.

Furthermore, not all TQM gurus actually adhered to a “zero defect” logic.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) represents “an approach to maintenance management that adopts a similar approach to total quality management.” TPM covers the entire life of the equipment, with an emphasis on continuous monitoring and preventive maintenance. To achieve this goal, TPM adopts the “total” perspective of TQM, i.e., it suggests synergistic relationships among all organizational functions, particularly between production and maintenance.

Main Features of TPM

  1. Seek efficiency to achieve maximum profitability.
  2. Prevent failures: Identify problems before they become failures; use quality tools to identify and explain failures (e.g., FMEA, fault tree analysis, Ishikawa Diagram).
  3. Generate partnerships: Have equipment designers, equipment operators, and maintenance department workers work together.
  4. Total engagement: Involve every employee from top management down.
  5. Increase Responsibility.
  6. Perform training continuously.

TPM = Preventive maintenance + total quality control + total employee involvement