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Individual Project 1 Total Quality Management was a theory put in work by a man named W. Edwards Diming, with the inspiration given to him by Walter Shewhartt, another huge contributor to the Quality Control era. Deming began to teach seminars around the world that would help teach other managers and production leaders to maximize their business by using TQM. Quality Control is a process that used statistical methods that can help a company define what direction they need to go in. Total Quality Management, however, is not a process or a system total quality management needs systems and processes to make it work. TQM can be considered as a management goal to long term success through customer satisfaction (John C. Timmermen, 2011). Some of the basic principles of instilling TQM in your company are being customer focused, having total employee participation, continuous improvement, and communication (John C. Timmermen, 2011). These are just some of the basic principles of total quality management. The most important of these is making sure that the customer of stakeholder is happy with the product or service you r company is supplying them with. For this to work properly, it means you have to ensure that your employees are happy so they can maximize their work effort. There are many companies that have begun to implement TQM in their work environment and many of the have been very successful in doing so. For example, Toyota has thrived on using TQM techniques to ensure quality in their product. The Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky does a great job at making sure their products meet the consumers needs and wants. This is done by involving the team members at Toyota by encouraging active roles in the quality process; use their employee ideas and opinions in the production process, and practicing Kaizen which means to continually improve (Wilbert W. James, Jr., 2006). Toyota starts its quest for making products that are superior in quality and

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performance ay step one, planning (Wilbert W. James, Jr., 2006). A lot goes into making an automobile, planning is the part where you use CAD software to see what they are making before it goes into production. The keystone of the quality process a Toyota is the role its team members play in the production line (Wilbert W. James, Jr., 2006). It is very evident that Toyota has successfully implemented total quality management to ensure complete quality and care when producing its products. On the other hand you have rare occasions where the total quality management process was a failure because it was not done correctly. A good example of this would be IBM. The International Business Machines (IBM) is a multinational technology and consulting corporation and is one of the largest companies in America. IBM attempted to install a program called Six Sigma, this program is a business management strategy to help improve the quality of you company (Goswami, 2011). IBM was one of the first companies to implement Six Sigma into their business (Goswami, 2011). IBM initially thought that would be able to make a major profit by implementing Six Sigma. Instead they ended up losing 16 billion dollars between the years 1991 and 1993 (Goswami, 2011). Some of the reason they had to suffer this loss was part of their production process. According to Phil Buckellew they had to test software for its customers to make sure they were working properly (Gauttam, 2010). In 2004 IBM launched an initiative to improve this process, they only problem was they had to test it all by hand. Another big issue with this was the time and skill they had to train people to do it the correct way. This is just one example of one company that starting out did not successfully implement TQM. Now that time has passed IBM has made great strides in there total quality management department.

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Works Cited
Gauttam, V. (2010, October 1). Retrieved August 23, 2013, from http://www.ssmrae.com/admin/images/15b356471e762ef4e963c2b2d11b3c88.pdf Goswami, D. (2011, April 26). slideshare. Retrieved August 23, 2013, from Limitations of TQM: http://www.slideshare.net/meetdevraj/limitations-of-tqm John C. Timmermen. (2011, January 1). Total Quality Management (TQM). Retrieved August 2013, 2013, from ASQ: http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-qualitymanagement/overview/overview.html Wilbert W. James, Jr. (2006, Jan 1). Toyota Quality. Retrieved August 23, 2013, from ToyotaGorgetown: http://www.toyotageorgetown.com/qualdex.asp