Recently, and over the past several months, I have had conversations or received emails regarding quality management and enterprise wide project and process improvement. With recalls in some industries and failing projects has come this reaffirmation to quality as a priority and activities that contribute to good quality and innovations. The discussions made me wonder about activities that contribute to on-going quality and process improvement throughout an organization or company. It caused me to have a number of questions including the following:
Whatever happened to Total Quality Management (TQM) which was a focus on a company’s internal requirements to improve the quality of its operations, products and services, with a customer focus? The emphasis was that quality is the responsibility of everyone, and it provided a feedback process and mechanism for employees and staff to submit suggestions for improvement. Is it just a buzz word during theses difficult economic times?
