Building and Sustaining Total Quality in Organizations

MGT16 (TQM) - CHAPTER 7: BUILDING AND SUSTAINING TOTAL QUALITY ORGANIZATIONS

Report of Ivyn Alcantara

* The principles of total quality – focus on the customer, involve everyone, and continuously improve – are simple to understand and represent common sense yet many companies have experienced great difficulty in implementing total quality and even deciding whether to do it.

* This difficulty often results from some common misconceptions, such as that total quality means doing lots of “things” like collecting data and organizing teams, or that it only applies to large companies.

* The TQ strategy does, however, require significant changes in organization design, processes and culture.

* Success takes top management involvement and cooperation from the workforce and workers’ organizations, as well as support from middle managers.

Making the Commitment to TQ

3 Obstacles to TQ implementation among companies that do not have a formal TQ effort:

1. Lack of Strong Motivation

* When faced with a threat to survival, an organization effects change more easily; under these circumstances, they generally implement TQ quickly and smoothly. However, a organization will generally have more difficulty in gaining support for TQ, or any significant change for that matter when not facing a crisis. This reluctance is a reflection of the attitude: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

* Unfortunately, complacency (feeling of being satisfied with how things are; self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies) today often leads to crises tomorrow.

* Leaders with foresight view TQ as an opportunity to get better, and to maintain or enhance existing market leadership positions.

2. Lack of Time to Devote to Quality Initiatives

* One often finds that the organization has plenty of time to correct errors, rework defective products, and waste time in complex processes that have resulted in years of...