Maturity

Diego A. Delgado

MG 495 BO Business Strategy Policy

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Case Study 2

Introduction

To be competitive in today's highly turbulent business environment, organizations are seeking a management edge. Total quality management (TQM) has been popularized as a means for attaining organizational efficiency and effectiveness within the context of a global marketplace, a changing economic atmosphere, and rapid advancements in technology. Researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of these tactics for the organization's long-term survival and nowhere is survival more crucial than in today's international arena. Because TQM is the product of several management philosophies aimed at meeting the goals of efficiency and effectiveness, there is a practical fit between TQM and an organization's strategic marketing plan.

However, it is not simply enough to adopt the TQM concept. The key to its success may hinge on how it is implemented. I identified 12 implementation factors associated with TQM which may affect performance. His findings suggest that TQM benefits are not equally distributed across adopters. This fact raises the tantalizing possibility that TQM benefits may be contingent on the product life cycle (PLC) stage of the organization. It is the purpose of this paper to describe how the product life cycle may affect the importance of each of the implementation factors identified by Powell, to describe the form this effect can take, and to provide insight into successes and failures of TQM.

Contrasted with traditional concepts

The definition of TQM might be perceived as abstract. TQM even uses aliases such as customer excellence, leadership through quality, and so on. According to some studies, it states it as "a management process to instill a culture of continuous improvement in an organization". It also defines TQM as "the totally integrated effort for gaining competitive advantage by continuously improving every...