Methods of maintaining consistent quality

1. Clear standards: every job has a written specification covering size, weight, ingredients or the time a task should take, so staff know exactly what an acceptable result looks like.
2. Training: staff are taught the standard and how to notice when their work is drifting away from it, which matters most in services where nothing can be checked before the customer receives it.
3. Quality control by inspection: finished output, or a sample of it, is checked against the standard by inspectors before it leaves the business.
4. Quality assurance: checks are built into every stage instead of the end, so each worker judges their own work against the standard before passing it on.
5. Total quality management: responsibility for quality is given to every employee in the business, from the buyer choosing suppliers to the driver making the delivery.

Quality control and quality assurance

1. Inspection stops most faulty goods reaching the customer, which protects the reputation of the business and keeps refunds down.
2. By the time an inspector rejects an item the fault has already been made, so the materials, labour and machine time are already spent and the unit can only be scrapped or reworked.
3. Inspecting a sample rather than everything keeps the cost down, but it means some faults still reach customers, and it tells nobody on the line why the fault happened.
4. Quality assurance moves the checking into each stage, so a fault is caught where it happens rather than travelling to the end of the line inside a nearly finished product.

Total quality management

1. Quality is everyone's job. The person taking phone orders, the buyer choosing suppliers, the machine operator and the delivery driver are all responsible for the quality the customer finally receives.
2. Right first time: faults are prevented at the stage they would occur instead of being found later, so there is nothing to scrap, refund or apologise for.
3. Each stage serves the next. A worker treats the next person in the process as their customer and will not pass on work they know is below standard.
4. Continuous improvement: the people who do the job suggest small changes to it, so the process keeps getting slightly better instead of standing still between crises.

Advantages to a business of using TQM

1. Faults are caught where they occur. A problem spotted at the stage it happens is far cheaper to put right than the same problem found in a finished product or by a customer.
2. Less waste and less rework: fewer items are scrapped or made a second time, so the cost of producing each good unit falls and materials stretch further.
3. Quality is built in rather than inspected in. The business needs fewer separate inspectors, because the checking happens inside the work itself as it is done.
4. Staff are more involved and better motivated. Being trusted to judge and improve their own work gives employees real responsibility, and workers who feel responsible take more care and stay longer.
5. A reputation for consistency: fewer faulty items reach customers, so complaints and returns fall and buyers come back to a business they can rely on.

What TQM demands from the business

1. Training for every employee: everyone has to learn the standard and how to check their own work against it, which costs money and takes people off the job while they learn.
2. A change of culture: staff used to leaving quality to inspectors have to accept responsibility for it, managers have to accept being told about problems, and if one department or supplier ignores the system faulty work still enters the process.
3. Time before the benefits show: the savings arrive only once the new habits are normal, so a business under pressure this month will see the cost long before the benefit.