Total Quality Management (TQM) consists of efforts of the entire organization to install and create a permanent climate in which an organization continuously improves its ability to offer high quality products and services to customers. While there is no widely agreed approach, TQM's efforts are generally based largely on previously developed quality control tools and techniques. TQM enjoyed widespread attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s before being eclipsed by ISO 9000, Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.
Total quality management has evolved from the quality assurance methods that were developed for the first time around the time of the First World War. The war effort led to large-scale manufacturing efforts that often produced poor quality. To help correct this, quality inspectors were introduced into the production line to ensure that the level of failure due to quality was minimized.
After the First World War, quality inspection became more common in manufacturing environments and this led to the introduction of Statistical Quality Control (SQC), a theory developed by Dr. W. Edwards Deming.
This quality method provided a statistical method of quality based on sampling. Where it was not possible to inspect each item, a quality sample was tested. The theory of SQC was based on the idea that a variation in the production process leads to a variation in the final product. If the variation in the process could be eliminated, this would lead to a higher level of quality in the final product.