Total Quality Management In The Saturn Car Company

INTRODUCTION

Total Quality Management (TQM) is defined as both a philosophy and a set of guiding principles that represent the foundation of a continuously improving organization. It is the application of quantitative methods and human resources to improve all the processes within an organization and exceed customer needs now and in the future. TQM integrates fundamental management techniques, existing improvement efforts, and technical tools under a disciplined approach.

TQM is an enhancement to the traditional way of doing business. It is a proven technique to guarantee survival in world – class – competition. Only by changing the actions of management will the culture and actions of an entire organization be transformed.

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Ten years after initiating a quality change program. TQM is still being used to invigorate the company. The Saturn car company is a continued success in the auto industry. It should be noted that Saturn Car Company is a continued success in the auto industry. It should be noted that Saturn gas yet to pull in an overall profit, but the high sales has GM looking at the car company in hind sight.

GM has taking what it has learned from Saturn and applied it to the other lines of cars. How can you measure the value of such information? So because of this new approach the TQM Company lives on as a modern day experiment, which by today’s terms is not so experiment, which by today’s terms is not so experimental. GM has emerged to meet these changing forces is termed Total Quality Management. Total Quality Management may be defined as an organizational strategy of commitment to improving customer satisfaction by developing techniques to carefully administer output quality. TQM is not so much a special technique, as it is an aspect of a reinvented corporate culture with a healthy commitment to improving reinvented corporate culture with a healthy commitment to improving quality in all organizational

Continuous improvement of the business and production process

There must be continuous improvement of all business and production process. Quality improvement projects, such as on-time delivery, order entry efficiency, billing error rate, customer satisfaction, cycle time, scrap reduction, and supplier management, are good things to begin. Technical techniques such as SPC, benchmarking, quality function development, ISO 9000, and designed experiments are excellent for problem solving.

5. Treating suppliers as partners.

A partnering relationship rather than an adversarial one must be developed. Both parties have as much to gain or lose based on the success or failure of the product or services. The focus should be on quality and life cycle cost rather than price. Suppliers should be few in number so that true partnering can happen.

6. Establish performance measures for the process.

Performance measures such as uptime, percent nonconforming, absenteeism and customer satisfaction should be determined for each function area. These measures should be posted to everyone to see. Quantitative data are necessary to measure the continuous quality improvement