Total Quality Management TQM Techniques

Many companies have adopted Total Quality Management as a way to promote continuous improvement in a broad range of business applications. TQM considers all business activities as processes, each one of which involves specific customer-supplier relationships. These relationships may be entirely internal, defined in terms of the process under study. For example, delivering efficient electronic mail service is a process in TQM terms. The customers for your company s electronic mail system are the employees who use it the supplier may office services, MIS, or other support personnel. 

Similarly, if you consider the preparation and updating of P IDs as a process, customers would be those employees who use P IDs for engineering, design, or training. Suppliers would be all personnel (engineering, operations, others) who have responsibility for assuring the accuracy and dissemination of P lDs. 

TQM calls on project teams to analyze business processes in terms of customer satisfaction, and begins with an understanding of who the customers are and who is responsible for meeting their expectations. In relatively simple processes (such as the electronic mail example), the customer-supplier relationship is fairly clearcut. In more complex processes that affect many people in different ways, there may be multiple customer and supplier categories, each requiring its own analysis. TQM untangles these processes by identifying the subprocesses, activities, and customer-supplier relationships they comprise. 

If you selected TQM techniques to address this gap, you would first assemble a TQM project team. (See Section 6.2 for more discussion of forming and managing teams.) Such a team would include representatives of the functional group that owns the process (that is, the people responsible for its operation), as well as of other groups who are the process s customers and suppliers, for example  

Another way to consider the customer-supplier relationship is in terms of those who have input into a process (suppliers) and those who use its output (customers). As this sample team suggests, very often a single group (in this case Maintenance) functions as both a customer and a supplier, having input into the process as well as need for its output. 

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