With the increased spate of global competition, quality management is now becoming more important in organizations. Every organization, needs to follow quality management principles, as such principles provide guidelines to the organizations on the application of quality management. Therefore, by practising quality management principles both the organizations and their other stakeholders, like customers, suppliers and the society are considerably benefited.
In terms of ISO framework, we can list the following eight quality management principles:
1. Customer-focused Organization:
Every organization depends on customers, and therefore, it is important for organizations to understand the present and future needs of customers, which may either be explicit or implicit. Organization should not only meet the customers’ expectations, they should even try to exceed the expectations of customers.
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2. Leadership:
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In organizations, leaders provide the unity of direction. Hence, through quality management practices, leaders should create and maintain the appropriate internal environment, so that people can work together to achieve the objectives of the organization.
3. Involvement of People:
Irrespective of the functional areas and hierarchical levels, people are the essence of every organization. Hence, quality management practices, among others, should try to make an effective use of people resources, ensuring their total involvement, to optimize the benefit for the organizations.
4. Process Approach:
It indicates management of resources and activities as a process.
5. Systems Approach:
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This principle calls for identification, understanding and management of integrated process of the organization as a system, so as to achieve the desired results.
6. Continuous Improvement:
For better quality management practices, organizations must focus on quality improvement on a continuous basis, as quality improvement is on-going.
7. Factual Decision Making:
Efficient quality management requires decision making based on facts, i.e., the data and information.
8. Mutually Beneficial Organization-Supplier Relationships:
Such relationships with the supplier enhance the motivation of suppliers to create value.
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In today’s competitive world, quality management helps in leading and operating an organization, so as to achieve a continuous improvement of performance in the long run by addressing the needs of customers and other stakeholders. ISO TCI76 on quality management and quality assurance defines quality management and quality assurance as consensus processes, and accordingly, provided the aforesaid eight quality management principles (QMP) that are more applicable in a business environment.
Successful TQM, therefore, requires behavioural and cultural changes in the organizations. Three management systems are aligned with the TQM initiative in any organization. Those are:
i. Organization Management Systems (OM)
ii. Human Resource Management Systems (HRM)
iii. Total Quality Management (TQM) Systems in itself
Thus, embracing human resource development and organizational development, organizations, by default, can achieve TQM. From the earlier definition of TQM, i.e., organizational improvement strategy through development of people, in a very simplistic way, we can say HRD + OD = TQM. ISO Standards can be defined as documented agreements that contain technical specifications and other criteria, which are consistent and can be used as rules, guidelines or definitions of attributes. These specifications can make materials, products, services and processes fit for the purpose.