The key tools for total quality management, sometimes referred to as quality assurance, incorporates the four management processes of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling within the organization thus
enabling the organization to better offer complete and total customer support and services, ensuring productivity and longevity after all without the customer where would an organization belong within the entire spectrum of being in business. Businesses must include all the parts as a whole. Customer, Suppliers, and Employees.
Total quality management involves all of the activities needed for getting the highest quality goods and services to the marketplace. Total quality management tools include statistical process control, a method where employees gather data and analyze variations in production activities. Statistical process control is used to identify any needed adjustments. Given that every organization would like complete uniformity in its output, the goal is unattainable; every organization experiences unit-to-unit variations in products and services. Organizations can better control product quality by using Statistical process control in order to understand the sources of variations.
With using control charts to plot, the results of sample measurements from operations identify when a process is beginning to depart from normal conditions so that any needed corrections can be made.
Quality/cost studies are useful because improvements in products or production processes always entail additional costs. This method can help identify areas in which quality can be maintained with the greatest cost savings from making, finding, repairing, or preventing defective goods and services. Getting closer to the customer involves maintaining contact through communications with the customer so that the organization knows what the customers needs and wants in the products they designs to better understand if their product will satisfy those needs and wants.
Through business reengineering the focus is on improving both the productivity and quality of organizational practices, this includes fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of organizational processes in-order to gain dramatic performance improvements.
Customers can be defined as the line in the bottom line, they may not be on any balance sheet but maybe they should be, by ignoring customer reactions to existing products or failing to keep up with the always ever-changing customer needs and wants can become a fatal blow to any organization, whereas the most successful organizations keep very close to their customers and know what they want and need in the products they consume.
References:
Ronald J. Ebert / Ricky W. Griffin
Business Essentials 4th Edition (2003) Prentice Hall