Quality Management a Competitive Advantage in a Global Market

Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, and International Standards Organization (ISO), are three of the processes or tools organizations need to compete and give them a competitive advantage in the global market of today and that will allow them to keep up with the ever changing World market in the future. Total Quality Management (TQM) is a philosophy that says that uniform commitment to quality in all areas of an organization promotes an organizational culture that meets consumers' perceptions of quality.
The concept of TQM rests largely on five principles:
• Produce quality work the first time.
• Focus on the customer.
• Have a strategic approach to improvement.
• Improve continuously.
• Encourage mutual respect and teamwork. To be effective in improving quality, TQM must be supported at all levels of an organization, from the highest executive to the lowest-level hourly employee. TQM extends the definition of quality to all functional areas of the organization, including production, marketing, finance, and information systems. The process begins by listening to customers' wants and needs and then delivering goods and services that fulfill these desires. TQM even expands the definition of customer to include any person inside or outside the company to whom an employee passes his or her work. In an assembly plant, for example, the warehouse supplies its customer, which is the line operator of the first station, then that operator supplies the next station on the line with its completed part, which is their customer and this continues until all the parts needed to finish the part is completed and is packed for shipping then sent back to the warehouse where it is readied for shipping to its customer.. This notion encourages each member of the organization to stay focused on quality