Total Quality Management (TQM) is based on the concept that all employees and managers feel jointly responsible for quality management in order to ensure and improve the quality of a company's products and services.
Today's TQM is based on the fundamentals of quality control. At the beginning of the 19th century, due to the division of labor (Taylorism), products were manufactured, but the majority of them were delivered to customers without quality inspection. As a result, the error rate of the products was very high. The introduction of quality controls ensured that the products were checked for suitability before delivery. Cost reductions and quality improvements have not yet been the focus. It was only later that the quality controls were refined and integrated into the manufacturing processes in order to identify faulty components close to production and to remove them from the production process.
Shewhart developed statistical methods for production and quality assurance in the 1920s. A quality control card was used for this, with which defective parts could be recognized during ongoing production and thus intervened in the production process in good time.
Deming further developed the during production inspection system with the “continuous improvement process”. In the 1950s he implemented quality management in Japan as an instrument for increasing productivity. It was not until the 1980s that the method was introduced as a Kaizen philosophy in companies in Europe and the USA. Juran expanded Deming's approach by including people as an influencing factor in quality considerations.
In Japan, quality management was seen early on as a comprehensive management task. It was only later that the TQM approach was also established in western companies, in which quality was seen as the task of all employees in the company.
