Fundamentals of Total Quality Management

Citation

Edgeman, R.L. (1998), "Fundamentals of Total Quality Management", The TQM Magazine, Vol. 10 No. 4, pp. 312-312. https://doi.org/10.1108/tqmm.1998.10.4.312.3

This text by three of Europe’s leading authorities on TQM is intended predominantly for an academic audience ‐ with Master’s degree level students as the primary target. It is also worth a look from quality management professionals, managers in general and, certainly, corporate libraries.

Coverage is relatively comprehensive and flows logically. As such, this text would well serve the individual who desires only one reference on TQM. The text is divided into three sections, each with several chapters. Section one, on “fundamentals of total quality management” comprises six chapters which address the historical development of TQM; various definitions of quality including such familiar ones as “fitness for purpose”; and “value for money”, but also less familiar ones such as the “transformative” definition; general TQM philosophy; quality management systems and standardization; and the European Quality Award. The second section has a methodological orientation and focuses on the so‐called “old” tools of quality; the newer “management and planning” (MP) tools; quality measurement including measurement of customer and employee satisfaction as well as in the important area of product development; quality costing; and benchmarking. Section three focuses on “process management and improvement” and begins with leadership, policy deployment, and quality motivation; moves on to the PDCA cycle; quality culture and learning; and concludes with two useful case studies contributed by Dahlgaard and Kristensen, co‐founders of the Danish Quality Prize.

Perhaps an outlier in content is inclusion of “matrix data analysis” among the MP tools. Consensus has dropped this topic from the MP toolset because its mathematical foundation (which deals with “characteristic roots” or “eigenvalues”) is several steps beyond the mathematical rigor required by other of the MP tools. Coverage of matrix data analysis is dealt with in a manner that disguises the difficulty of the technique and is presented before the less complex methods of affinity diagrams, matrix diagrams (not to be confused with matrix data analysis), prioritization matrices, and the analytical hierarchy method (which also makes use of eigenvalues). Inclusion of matrix data analysis is perhaps an error in judgement and its presentation prior to the other MP tools discussed is almost certainly a mistake in that linear readers who lack the requisite mathematical background for this tool may well never make it to the very useful, but much simpler tools represented by affinity and matrix diagrams.

Subject to some qualifications, this text is worthy of consideration. First, the content is generally presented at a survey level ‐ for example the chapter devoted to benchmarking is a bite‐sized 13 pages ‐ thus those in search of in‐depth coverage are sure to be disappointed. Similarly, those with a reasonable collection of TQM resources will find little in the way of marginal contribution. Those in search of a TQM survey, whether for personal or classroom purposes, may well find the breadth of coverage attractive and will want to give this text a careful look.