What is tqm and six sigma

Both Six Sigma and TQM have many similarities and are compatible in varied business environments, including manufacturing and service industries.

While TQM has helped many companies in improving the quality of manufactured goods or services rendered, Six Sigma has the potential of delivering even sharper results. Total Quality Management is often associated with the development, deployment, and maintenance of organizational systems that are required for various business processes.

It is based on a strategic approach that focuses on maintaining existing quality standards as well as making incremental quality improvements. It can also be described as a cultural initiative as the focus is on establishing a culture of collaboration among various functional departments within an organization for improving overall quality.

In comparison, Six Sigma is more than just a process improvement program as it is based on concepts that focus on continuous quality improvements for achieving near perfection by restricting the number of possible defects to less than 3. It is complementary to Statistical Process Control SPC , which uses statistical methods for monitoring and controlling business processes.

Although both SPC and TQM help in improving quality, they often reach a stage after which no further quality improvements can be made. Six Sigma, on the other hand, is different as it focuses on taking quality improvement processes to the next level.

While TQM views quality as conformance to internal requirements, Six Sigma focuses on improving quality by reducing the number of defects. The end result may be the same in both the concepts i. Six Sigma helps organizations in reducing operational costs by focusing on defect reduction, cycle time reduction, and cost savings.

It is different from conventional cost cutting measures that may reduce value and quality. It focuses on identifying and eliminating costs that provide no value to customers such as costs incurred due to waste.

TQM initiatives focus on improving individual operations within unrelated business processes whereas Six Sigma programs focus on improving all the operations within a single business process. Six Sigma initiatives are based on a preplanned project charter that outlines the scale of a project, financial targets, anticipated benefits and milestones. We offer several training and certification programs.

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TQM vs. For example: We focused on quality and ignored other critical business issues. Quality trumped everything else. Of course, this made no business sense and often lead to organizations that failed despite improved quality.

We created a quality specialty that suffered from all of the same suboptimization problems as other functions within the organization.

Despite all of our talk about a systems perspective, when push came to shove we fought for our point of view and our budget just like everyone else. Thus, they backed off of-or never started-efforts of their own. We emphasized minimum acceptance requirements and standards, rather than striving for ever increasing levels of performance.

We never developed an infrastructure for freeing up resources to improve business processes. We developed a career path in quality. Quality professionals tended to lack subject matter expertise in other areas of the company. This division of labor, combined with functionally specialized organization, made it difficult to improve quality beyond a certain level. I estimate that this type of organization tops out at about 3.

Six Sigma addresses all of these issues: Six Sigma extends the use of the improvement tools to cost, cycle time, and other business issues. Six Sigma discards the majority of the quality toolkit. There is a proper allotment of work in an organization to the Six Sigma project team to ensure that the program is effectively implemented which consists of the following levels:. Six Sigma projects are implemented using the DMAIC approach define, measure, analyze and control which gives a clear road map to be followed.

Hence, a disciplined framework like this helps in maintaining constant progress in analyzing and improvising to achieve total quality in the system. A top-to-bottom training procedure is followed in the Six Sigma program and system improvement methodologies for all levels in the organizational hierarchy. As an innovation-driven methodology, it thoroughly utilizes the quality and statistical tools to transform a practical problem to a practical solution by new ways and thus helps in achieving a defect-free system with total quality.

This approach is based on the organization which is developing the system for customers. It helps in improving the existing business system by following these steps:. This approach is based on customers need and satisfaction when there is a need to create a new design or product and it follows these steps:.

Six Sigma program involves the use of quality and statistical tools in a structured fashion for gaining the insight needed to attain better, faster and less expensive products and services than those offered by their contemporaries. The results have also spoken to the organizations by ensuring Total Quality Management to them and hence proved efficient in fulfilling customers need and expectations successfully.

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