Total Quality Management in International

Total Quality Management in International Business

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a "management approach of an organization, centered on quality, based on 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. Thus, three important tenets exist:

It necessitates an internal managerial system of planning, controlling and decision making for continuous improvement.

It requires participation by everyone in the organization.

It focuses on improving goods and services from the customer's point-of-view.

A question would arise as, "Total Quality Management, is it just another fad?" A Macarena of management techniques, so to speak. "Is it an old wine in a new bottle or does it have core values that are different from other management theories.

It's just another fad. Fashionable management discourse such as Total Quality Management tends to follow a certain lifecycle. It rises and it dies. Total Quality Management peaked between 1992 and 1996 while rapidly losing popularity in terms of citations after these years. It is argued that the use of the word Total Quality Management discourse created by a positive utility regardless of what the manager's meant by it. Later on, the use of the word Total Quality Management in implementation of reforms lost the positive utility attached to the mere fact of using the term and sometimes associations with Total Quality Management became negative.

Quality is the summation of all the characteristics of a product or service that influence its ability to meet the stated or implied needs of the person acquiring it. Quality must be viewed from the perspective of the user rather than the service provider and relates to both performance and value. The user's view of quality reflects more than whether the product or service delivers as it was intended, its rate of failure or the probability of purchasing a defective unit. The modern company's emphasis on quality has caused managers to rethink many ideas about the cost of increasing quality.

How much does quality, or the lack thereof, costs? It is substantial. The cost of quality is basically the sum of all that would disappear if we did everything right the first time. Lack of quality would be the sum of all defects done from the beginning of the process.