Nowadays one can observe the increased competition in almost all industries and spheres of life. The products have become much more sophisticated, but still there are a lot of people that are dissatisfied with the poor or insufficient quality of the products. The companies that can invest additional resources into the improvement of the products may eventually receive a strong competitive advantage, because they will successfully satisfy the customers’ needs. Some companies go further and make the customer satisfaction the top priority and for them improvement of the quality standards in one of the main business objectives. In order to reach such an ambitious goal, the companies should spend a lot of resources and involve a lot of employees into the process of improvement.
The concept that describes the process of the permanent improvement is called the total quality management and for many decades it has been used by the large companies around the world. Nevertheless the focus of the improvement has significantly changed. At the beginning of the XX century the companies made sure that the products met some specific technical specifications. In the 1940s, the companies started to use a lot of statistical data in order to monitor the production process. 20 years later quality management became a very popular topic in the management literature and its meaning became very broad and complicated. Quality management was mainly concerned with the whole organization including in addition to the production process. Nowadays production of the high quality products means meeting the customer expectations (Reid & Sanders 142).
The main difference between the old and the contemporary meaning of the total quality management is that the old concept was focused on eliminating the quality problems after they were discovered. On the contrary, the newer concept is much more proactive and helps to develop and manufacture the products that will have the excellent quality from the very beginning (Reid & Sanders 142).
Some of the main ideas of the contemporary total quality management include: customer-centered service, continuous improvement, employee empowerment, use of quality tools, product design, process management and managing supplier quality (Reid & Sanders 147). Next, each main idea has a set of approaches that can be applied by the companies. For example, a lot of companies carry out continuous improvement by means of benchmarking. Benchmarking helps to get familiar with the business practices of the other companies in the same or different industry. The main goal is to find the business practices that later will be introduced in order to increase the quality of the products.
The concept of total quality management became institutionalized and the companies strive not only to produce the high quality products, but also to cooperate with the companies that are good at continuous quality improvement too. In the international trade, in order to make the communication between the foreign companies easier, the common standards of quality were introduced. One of the most popular classifications is the ISO 9000 Standards that are applied in more than 90 countries (Reid & Sanders 160). These standards may be applied to all kinds of companies and in order to be certified, the companies need to present documentation of the quality processes that include worker trainings, control tools, methods to monitor quality, etc. (Reid & Sanders 160).
Undoubtedly, all stakeholders including me may benefit from the implementation of the total quality management in the real life. Being a consumer of many products I am interested in buying only those products that have good quality. Now there is a very wide choice of the products and both small and large companies may improve the quality if they are committed to it no matter what kind of resources and assets they have. Thanks to the innovative managerial approaches the number of the products with the good quality is rising in the competitive industries. So the quality standards are one of the main prerequisites of the successful companies.
What is more, if the company applies the total quality management, it means that it is worth working for such a company. Some of the benefits of the total quality management include higher profitability, job security, improved employee morale, better cost management (Westcott). Consequently, the employees earn more money if they correspond to the working requirements and show that they would like to contribute to the continuous improvement of the products and services on a regular basis.
Moreover, successful companies that own popular brands usually have the working environment that is very pleasant to work in. There are many rewards including higher salaries and more importantly the employees get satisfaction from the continuous improvement practices that result in the creation of the products that have the higher economic value. On the contrary, it is not worth working for companies that fail to apply the total quality management. Usually such companies do not have innovative corporate culture, because the top management is not supportive and there is too much reliance on the statistical process control (Reid & Sanders 162).
Finally, the total quality management may be also applied at the individual level. It is important for a person to understand that in order to be competitive one should master some unique skills and never stop developing them further taking into account the changing business environment. For example, the plan-do-study-act cycle may be of great help if one would like to grow professionally. This cycle helps to prevent ineffective work and allows incorporating continuous improvement in the everyday activity. As the result a person or a company may build up a very strong expertise in the particular field of knowledge and be able to capitalize on it in the future.
Works Cited
Reid, D., Sanders, N. Operations Management. Fifth Edition. John Wiley & Sons. 2012.
Web. 29 April 2016
Westcott, R. Benefits of Total Quality Management (Case Studies). American Society for
Quality. n.d. Web. 29 April 2016
