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ToTAl quAliTy mAnAgEmEnT (Tqm) 97
● ‘Of 500 US manufacturing and service companies, only a third felt their Total Qual-
ity programmes had significant impact on their competitiveness.’
● ‘Only a fifth of the 100 British firms surveyed believed their quality programmes had
achieved tangible results.’
● ‘Of those quality programmes that have been in place for more than two years, two-
thirds simply grind to a halt because of their failure to produce hoped-for results.’
Also, the excessive ‘quality bureaucracy’ associated with TQM – in particular, the con-
tinued use of standards and procedures – encourages ‘management by manual’ and
over-systematised decision making, and is expensive and time-consuming. Further-
more, it is too formulaic, encouraging operations to substitute a ‘recipe’ for a more
customised and creative approach to managing operations improvement.
As far as the second criticism (‘we have incorporated much of TQM anyway’) is con-
cerned, it is undoubtedly true that some of the fundamentals of TQM have entered
the vernacular of operations improvement. The idea of continuous improvement is
perhaps the most obvious example. However, other elements such as the internal
customer concept including service level agreements (SLAs), the idea of internal and
external failure-related costs, and many aspects of individual staff empowerment, have
all become widespread. Yet this is not really a criticism of TQM as such. Rather, it is a
criticism of the practice of ‘packaging’ individual improvement elements under a single
improvement ‘brand’. It is an issue that we shall return to later in this chapter.

lessons from Tqm
The core concept of a ‘total, or holistic, view’ of any issue is both powerful and attrac-
tive. At its simplest, it provides on outline ‘checklist’ of how to go about operations
improvement. It is also capable of being developed into a more prescriptive form.
The best example of this is the EFQM Excellence Model, developed by the European
Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). Originally the European Quality Award
(EQA), awarded to the most successful exponent of total quality management in
Europe each year, the model was modified and renamed the ‘EFQM Excellence Model’
or ‘Business Excellence Model’. The EFQM Excellence Model is shown in Figure 3.2.
The five ‘enablers’ are concerned with how results are being achieved, while the four
‘results’ are concerned with what the company has achieved and is achieving. The
main advantage of using such models for self-assessment seems to be that companies
find it easier to understand some of the more philosophical concepts of TQM when
they are translated into specific areas, questions and percentages. Self-assessment
also allows organisations to measure their progress in changing their organisation
and in achieving the benefits of TQM. An important aspect of self-assessment is an
organisation’s ability to judge the relative importance of the assessment categories
to its own circumstances.

Where does Tqm fit into operations strategy?

Various authors have put forward prescriptions on how to integrate TQM into a business
strategy. Many of these prescriptions stress that operations quality programmes should
be both strategic and comprehensive. In other words, if one applied the operations
strategy matrix to such an initiative, we would expect to see a spread of activities (albeit
of differing priority) at the intersections with each of the decision areas. To test this

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