TABLE OF CONTENTS Total quality management (TQM) is a philosophy of pursuing continuous improvement in each process through the integrated efforts of all individuals in the organization.
Although the history of the quality-related efforts may be traced back to ancient times (e.g., Egyptian wall paintings of around 1450 B.C. show evidence of measurement and inspection activity [1]), the roots of the total quality movement only go back to the early 1900s in the time and motion study works of Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management [2 4]. The efforts of such individuals as W. E. Deming, J. Juran, and A. V. Feigenbaum in the late 1940s greatly helped to strengthen the TQM movement [5].
In 1951, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers established a prize named after Deming to be awarded to the organization that demonstrated the most effective implementation of quality policies and procedures [6]. In 1985, an American behavioral scientist, Nancy Warren, coined the term total quality management [7]. In 1987, the U.S. government established the Malcolm Baldrige Award for companies demonstrating the most successful implementation of quality-assurance policies and procedures.
In 1988, the first Malcolm Baldrige Award was given to the cellular telephone division of Motorola for its achievement in lowering defects from 1,000 per million to 100 per million during 1985 to 1988 [8, 9]. Also, the division set a goal of reducing defects to four defects per million by 1992. This chapter presents some of the important aspects of TQM.
