Total Quality Management

Total quality management is an industrial engineering management method that seeks to embed continuous improvement of product and process quality into every level and function of an organization, rather than treating quality control as a separate inspection step performed only at the end of production. It draws on the statistical quality-control ideas of William Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, who taught Japanese manufacturers after the Second World War that systematically reducing process variation and involving workers in identifying problems improves quality and lowers cost simultaneously. The approach spread to manufacturing and service organizations worldwide from the 1980s onward as companies sought to match the quality reputation Japanese manufacturers had built using these methods.