Quality Matters!

The Customer is King!

It can takes months to find a new customer, but only seconds to lose them!

These may sound like little more than the sort of buzzword phrases that cause people to cringe when marketers enter the room. But like many slogans, there is a grain of truth behind them.

The grain, in this case, is related to the satisfaction of the customer. In order to have a successful long-term relationship with a customer, they must not only be happy with the purchasing process. They must also continue to enjoy the product that they purchased. You can create the most wonderful product the world has ever seen, but if it breaks down one month after purchase, your company is destined to fail.

Total Quality Management (TQM) defines a process aimed at ensuring that the quality of the products created by a company remains high. It does this by making quality a corporate-wide objective. It empowers employees to act when they observe any activity that might detrimentally impact product quality. It puts into place a series of steps that are designed to improve on the ways in which the company does business.

The overarching view of TQM is that an organization is collection of processes. In order to be successful, each of these processes should be focused on ensuring customer satisfaction and achieving corporate goals. To get to that point, each process needs to be continually improving. In fact, TQM is known for being a continuous exercise, as opposed to a one-time review. In order to see continual improvement, management must be focused on four main steps: Plan, Do, Check and Act

The planning phase consists of selecting and clearly defining the problem that is do be addressed. It is very important at this point to define a goal that is measurable. Lack of measurability is a common reason for failure to improve. Once the goal has been identified, determine which processes impact the goal. Select one of the processes and analyze it to identify the root causes of the problem (with respect to this process).

Once a problem and root causes has been determined, the do phase consists of determining the solution and implementing it on a trial basis. The idea is to determine if the impact of the solution is what is expected. If the problem being addressed is small, a trial might be overkill. But in most scenarios, companies shouldn't commit the resources for a full-blown solution until the efficacy of the solution can be determined.

Once the solution has been implemented, the 'check' stage is ready to go. This is a matter of reviewing the results generated by implementing the solution. And it is the reason for suggesting that the original goal be measurable. When it is, the process of determining the success or failure of the solution is much easier.

Finally, assuming that the solution was successful, is the 'act' phase. This involves a full roll-out of the solution. It also includes an on-going mechanism to allow for the monitoring of the problem. One of the underlying assumptions of TQM is that is good today is not necessarily good tomorrow. Without on-going monitoring, it becomes very easy to continue to do something "because it has always been done that way". TQM requires that the purpose for any step be reviewed on a regular basis to make sure that it is still applicable to the process.

And that, after all, is the goal for TQM. To provide a structure that allows corporations to continually tune their processes to maximize customer satisfaction and ensure the on-going success of the company.

Learn more about this author, Bruce Johnson.
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