06-11-2017, 11:09 AM
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.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the developed countries of North America and Western Europe suffered economically from the stiff competition from Japan's ability to produce high-quality goods at a competitive cost. For the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the United Kingdom became a net importer of finished products. The United States undertook its own examination of conscience, expressed more directly in the television broadcast of If Japan Can ... Why No We Can? Companies began to reexamine the quality control techniques invented in the last 50 years and how those techniques had been used so successfully by the Japanese. It was in the midst of this economic turbulence that the TQM took root.