What are TQM, Six Sigma, and Lean?
TQM stands for Total Quality Management, which is an approach to operating a business with the goals of delighting the customers and increasing profits by working toward eliminating wasted time and materials. TQM is a philosophy that carries these four principles: • Everyone in the organization—from top to bottom—is focused on working as a team to satisfy the customer. Customer specifications become the gauge for quality. • There are many sources of wasted time, effort, and materials within the organization, and employees—not top management—are the key to finding and eliminating them. The flaws within the production system are understood better by the people who actually work in it than by anyone else in the organization. • Most waste and bad product is due to management’s traditional approach of product control. Product control revolves around setting production quotas and then inspecting the product before shipping it. A much more effective approach is process control. Process contro
