Gluu Glossary

Total Quality Management (TQM)

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management philosophy that makes continuous improvement, customer satisfaction, and employee involvement everyone’s job across the organisation, not just quality control’s.

TQM rests on four disciplines – quality planning, assurance, control, and improvement – and on the ISO view of quality as something the whole organisation participates in, aimed at long-term success through customer satisfaction. It emerged in the 1920s but took hold widely in the 1980s.

Today TQM is less often the primary framework in use – ISO 9001, Lean, and Six Sigma have more specific practices – but its core idea persists in all of them: “do the right things, right the first time, every time,” built from the knowledge of the people doing the work.