An Introduction to Total Quality Management
Introduction
The name ‘Federal Express’ is synonymous with quality. It is recognized that the Federal Express Company a world leader in transportation area and information field. Federal Express can deliver packages overnight to almost anywhere in the world. Simultaneously, people can track packages at any time so that they can know where their goods are. (Neff & Citrin, 2001) As the good quality and services Federal Express provided, people like it, trust it and make it universally. Thus, a distinctive quality is vital to every organization at present if you want to have bigger market share in the world. However, how could people achieve it?
Quality management is an excellent method to resolve it. In the following parts, this project will briefly identify the definition of quality and total quality and tell the differences between them at the same time. Moreover, it will illustrate three main pioneers of total quality management during the development. In the end, the following project will make some prediction of the trends of quality management in the future.
Quality and Total Quality
Quality
“Quality” is a word that is commonly used in daily life. People can often see the term in advertisements that declare ‘superior quality’, ‘quality comes first’, ‘quality all the way’ and so on. However, it is hard to find the best appropriate definition to quality. According to Goetsch and Davis (2006), though there is no generally adopted definition of quality, a number of similarities and ingredients could be abstracted as follows.
a) Quality meets and exceeds customer expectations.
b) Quality is suitable for products, services, people, processes and environments.
c) Quality is constantly changing.
With the above normal ingredients abstracted, Goetsch and Davis (2006, p5) defined quality as: ‘Quality is a dynamic state associated with products, services, people, processes and environments that meets or exceeds expectations.’
Total Quality
The name ‘Federal Express’ is synonymous with quality. It is recognized that the Federal Express Company a world leader in transportation area and information field. Federal Express can deliver packages overnight to almost anywhere in the world. Simultaneously, people can track packages at any time so that they can know where their goods are. (Neff & Citrin, 2001) As the good quality and services Federal Express provided, people like it, trust it and make it universally. Thus, a distinctive quality is vital to every organization at present if you want to have bigger market share in the world. However, how could people achieve it?
Quality management is an excellent method to resolve it. In the following parts, this project will briefly identify the definition of quality and total quality and tell the differences between them at the same time. Moreover, it will illustrate three main pioneers of total quality management during the development. In the end, the following project will make some prediction of the trends of quality management in the future.
Quality and Total Quality
Quality
“Quality” is a word that is commonly used in daily life. People can often see the term in advertisements that declare ‘superior quality’, ‘quality comes first’, ‘quality all the way’ and so on. However, it is hard to find the best appropriate definition to quality. According to Goetsch and Davis (2006), though there is no generally adopted definition of quality, a number of similarities and ingredients could be abstracted as follows.
a) Quality meets and exceeds customer expectations.
b) Quality is suitable for products, services, people, processes and environments.
c) Quality is constantly changing.
With the above normal ingredients abstracted, Goetsch and Davis (2006, p5) defined quality as: ‘Quality is a dynamic state associated with products, services, people, processes and environments that meets or exceeds expectations.’
Total Quality