The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Total Quality Management

What is TQM (Total Quality Management):

Total quality management, also abbreviated as TQM, is one of the most important approaches that each and every organization should include. Taking one word at a time, total means the whole or complete, quality means the extent of excellence and greatness that is provided by the product or service, and management is defined as the art of controlling. Putting it all together, TQM is the art of controlling the whole or complete to obtain greatness of products and services. TQM is an approach that looks for boosting and improving the quality of products and services through taking into consideration the feedbacks and responses of customers. It is a method of controlling future results, promising product

Since in the first few paragraphs I have stated the advantages of TQM, I decided to also involve some disadvantages of TQM that many managers and employees don’t know about.

Some of the disadvantages of total quality management includes a changing culture, needs plenty of planning, time and resources, takes much time to show satisfying and favorable results and finally quality is expensive. Changing culture: TQM depends on an organizational culture that is always and constantly advancing and changing to the best to grab the customers’ satisfaction. It is an organization that is willing to commit to the goal of improving, so a company that is not willing to change their organizations culture forever should not implement total quality management strategy in their organization. Planning, time and resources: TQM systems needs a management that is willing to make plans for long-term use since it takes years to implement the strategy. Also, the strategy cannot be implemented without enough time and enough resources and if the plan set goes wrong and fails, this will cause the whole strategy to fail. Results take time: Since TQM is a long-term procedure; the results will also take a long period until they are shown. A management that doesn’t have patience and lacks motivation would not feel comfortable to implement total quality management system to its’ organization. Quality is expensive: Total quality management strategy is an expensive system and so each additional service would cost the company. Such costs include additional training costs, improvement costs and investments in machine inspections. We can conclude that total quality management strategy is not suitable for small management since the strategy will cost the company a