Implementing TQM - Who Should Drive TQM Initiative

Total Quality Management, in short commonly called \"TQM\", has been in the business jargon for many many years. There has been numerous success stories about companies implementing TQM especially in the more advanced business sectors such as Motorola, Selectron, Boeing Airlift and Tanker Programs, 3M Dental Products Division, IBM Rochester, Granite Rock Company, Raytheon, Texas Nameplate Company etc. Incidentally, these companies has one thing in common i.e. they are all Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners in their respective year. You can obtain many more of these winners and their cases studies from http://quality.nist.gov/

It has often come to my mind how to measure an organization success in implementing TQM. If we take the above organizations as a benchmark, all of them are winners of the Baldrige Award.

What does it takes for these company to be successful in implementing TQM? I have made a studies of these companies based on their company write-up in the Baldrige Award criteria, it is a common practice that the CEO of these companies personally drives the TQM initiatives. They set clear direction to their employees and personally involve and review TQM activities. All of them are very customer focus and value their employee in many aspects. All of these companies emphasized a work culture of team work and continuous improvement.

In Malaysia, besides the MNC, there are many big and small organizations owns by the locals. Many of them attempted to implement TQM. How successful are they? Well, if we benchmark Baldrige Award as a way to measure their TQM success, then the local Quality Management Excellence Award (QMEA) scheme is an equivalent because it is benchmarked against the Baldrige Criteria. Most of these organizations are not winners of QMEA. Therefore, if we based on winning QMEA as a yardstick, most of the local organizations cannot be considered as successful in implementing TQM.

However, the issue is that most of these organizations has substantial market share, good profitability and so on, how then we perceived they are not successful in TQM implementation?

From the many organizations I dealt with, the CEO of many of these companies do set clear direction, perform business reviews etc. However, very few of them are involve personally in driving TQM initiative. Often it is left it ot a TQM director or manager to drive this initiative. Whereas CEO focus very much on business rather than operational issues as TQM is considered as operational.

Well, I guess there is no right approach to implement TQM with respect to who should drives it. Since CEO of all Baldrige winners drives TQM initiative and they are successful. Then, it is up to the CEO of local organization to realize this fact and decide how they want to drive their TQM initiative moving forward.

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\r About the Author: Dr. LM Foong, PhD\r
He writes and prublishes TQM articles, ebooks, case studies, trainer manual and other TQM Related information made available at the Resource Center in Total Quality Management

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