For decades now Total Quality Management (TQM) has been a dominant management concept for improving competitiveness and financial results. In recent years, however, TQM seems to have lost some of its nimbus with other concepts and approaches such as Lean Enterprise and Six Sigma launched and increasingly in vogue. The aim of this paper is to look at TQM and Six Sigma, their backgrounds, definit...

This study addresses managers’ awareness and familiarity with Total Quality Management (TQM). Eighteen (18) semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with managers working in a variety of service organizations in Greece. The major argument of the study is that although the acronym TQM and some of its concepts and practices are known by a range of public and private sector managers, ac...

 Total quality management (TQM) is one of the key approaches towards realizing the goal of meeting customer satistaction. Besides efforts for quality improvement by large companies, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have also pursued their quality improvement effort, but mostly through the ISO 9000 certification route. Few of these SMEs have actually implemented a total app...

Recent years have witnessed rising interest towards integrated performance measurement and control systems. Total Quality Management (TQM) and Balanced Scorecard (BSC) are management philosophies that have been widely discussed not only in academic world, but also in business world. The aim of this paper is to compare the contents of TQM and BSC and to build a hierarchy of concepts between thes...

Total quality management (TQM) must become a part of corporate strategy if it is to become a way of life in health care. TQM should be understood in the context of a cultural transformation. The greatest challenge for top management is to create an organization in which every employee, department and function is linked inextricably to the organization's mission and vision. One of the key benefi...

Introduction To be successful in the long term, an organization must produce quality goods or services. Quality is the value of goods or service as perceived by the customer. In recognition of these realities, good managers will establish a set of quality management principles that focuses on customer satisfaction and continuous improvement in the organization’s processes. This set of principle...

Recognition of quality management as an important factor holds the key to competitiveness in the global market irrespective of the size of the company. Total Quality Management (TQM) practices are primarily found in larger and multinational organizations but little has been written on how TQM has been applied in SMEs of Malaysia. This project reports the results of a full survey conducted among...

Presents the key findings of a study into quality practices of a number of organisations in one of the Arab countries, Qatar, which is recognised as one of the leading liquefied natural gas-exporting regions since its reserves of gas represent about 7.4 per cent of the world total. The purposes of the study were to assess: the awareness, the understanding, the progress of, and reasons for the i...

Transforming a public sector bureaucracy into a learning organisation by means of total quality management (TQM) can be a challenge when the politics of the organisation work against the process of trying to help individuals take responsibility for their own learning. In the TQM literature, a Pac-Man theory of implementing TQM has been suggested for dealing with these kinds of environments. How...

The successful implementation of Total Quality Management (TQM) in the higher education (HE) system has been a highly debated and contentious subject. However, small effect TQM tools was implemented non-academic activities HE institutions. They are mainly concentrated on practices which bill payments, registration purchase activities. significant factors such as curriculum development, teaching...