Total Quality Management: Text, Cases and Readings

The book explains the concept of Total Quality Management which involves the integration of all functions and processes in any organisation to ensure that it achieves continuous improvement of its products and services to meet customer needs. Quality starts with understanding customer needs and ends when those needs are satisfied. Marketing processes establish the true requirements for the product or service. These must be communicated properly throughout the organisation in the form of specifications. Excellent communications between customers and suppliers is the key to a total quality performance - the organisation must establish feedback systems to gather customer information. Appropriate research techniques should be used to understand the "market" and keep close to customers and maintain the external perspective. All effective quality programmes have at their centre a very clear focus on customers. Delivering customer satisfaction is the primary goal for an organisation and the approach is inherently simple - listen to customers and respond to what they say. An organisation should have a wide range of methods for listening to their customers, ranging from market research to asking customers detailed questions about how they feel about a specific transaction with the organisation. From this data an organisation can built quantitative models of the drivers of customer satisfaction which enable them to ensure that internal measures are aligned with what customers really want. The cases reinforce the concepts discussed in the book which makes it valuable for those embarking on studies of TQM or those who need to learn how the concept can be applied in their organisation.