From Quality Circles to TQM

CORNERSTONES OF QUALITY

y the late 1970s, American industrial firms had begun to take notice of the rapidly improving competitive position of Japanese manufacturing. Some companies, such as Hewlett Packard and Xerox, already had business relationships with Japanese firms, and would become the early champions of the quality movement's importation back into the United States.

But many American companies and some government agencies were looking for a quick turnaround approach that would replicate the Japanese quality success without altering the structure of American management. Most attractive was the Japanese use of voluntary work groups who met regularly to discuss how to improve the quality of products and work processes--a concept called "quality circles."

First Missteps

So began a rather tenuous experiment: the formation of quality circles in which small groups of employees and supervisors--"volunteers"--would receive basic training in statistical quality control techniques and then, under the leadership of a trained facilitator, meet regularly to analyze, solve and recommend solutions to quality problems to top management.

While these early efforts were hailed as revolutionary
first-time efforts at participative management, they largely failed. Indeed, just as some government agencies were starting up their quality circles, private companies were abandoning the effort in droves.

Of course, there were many small successes within quality circles. Federal organizations as diverse as the Norfolk, Va., Naval Shipyard, NASA's Lewis Space Center and the U.S. Customs Service reported varying degrees of success in using quality circles to improve products and services. But any comparison to the Japanese model showed vast inadequacies.

Model Japanese companies had 75 percent or more of their workforce in quality circles--in fact, many workers participated in several quality circles. Top managers relentlessly pushed all of their cost, quality and performance data down to the lowest levels of the organization for rigorous evaluation and action. Every worker and supervisor already had extensive training in quality measurement concepts and trust between management and employees was high. Most Japanese labor unions were company unions that supported different kinds of employees meeting and discussing work process changes.

Few of these conditions were prevalent in American corporations and government. Even those experimenting with quality circles with the best intentions simply faced too many obstacles. After a few successes, most organizations were willing to declare victory, abandon the circles and then wait for the next stage of development--an organizationally comprehensive approach to quality under the banner of total quality management.

The Advent of TQM

By the mid to late 1980s, total quality management, or TQM, was all the rage. Billions of dollars were invested in training, consulting, and management education efforts in an all-out effort to close the quality gap between the United States and Japan and to remake the basic management precepts of American industry.

In 1987, Congress created a national quality award competition, named in honor of Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige, who had died as a result of a rodeo accident. The Baldrige Award has been a central element both in promoting American quality progress and providing a framework for evaluating an organization's management effectiveness. This latter aspect is even more prominent with major changes that have been made in the 1997 award criteria, emphasizing business results, markets and strategic planning.

TQM was, as most management tools are these days, a consulting term. Indeed, as a label it eventually became such an albatross that many organizations came up with their own terms, such as TQL (total quality leadership) or TQO (total quality organization) to replace it.

The focus on total quality was centered on measuring the costs incurred because of defects in products or services. This led to larger, systematic efforts at continuous improvement in quality through work groups or teams (often called quality improvement teams) that tried to refine their work processes to improve quality levels.

But in TQM, quality and continuous improvement must be integrated into an overall organizational approach that focuses management planning and workforce involvement on improving current and future quality levels to meet customer requirements. The result is a management system whose basic elements are customer focus, quality planning, process measurement, continuous improvement cycles, quality goals and objectives, and total participation within an organization.

TQM is not a short-term accomplishment. Anyone who has worked in quality management will say that it requires years to create a mature quality management system. TQM is often described as a journey, not a destination. That instantly became the first major obstacle in applying TQM to the public sector-getting long-term support from the short-term-focused political appointees in government agencies who wanted results for which they could take credit in their two- to three-year average length of stay in office.

Adapting TQM to Government

Other factors would also make adapting TQM to the public sector difficult. First, there was the argument that TQM was mostly used by manufacturing organizations. Critics were quick to point out that Japanese government agencies didn't use TQM.

Questions were also raised about who were government's "customers"--citizens, interest groups, members of Congress or other stakeholders? Government had to serve too many competing groups to be truly customer-focused, or so the argument went.

Despite such roadblocks, TQM began to make considerable inroads into government in the late 1980s. The Reagan administration created a Federal Quality Institute and a quality award for agencies--the President's Quality Award--using a modified version of the Baldrige Award criteria.

But partly because of the less-than-enthusiastic agency response to President Reagan's productivity improvement initiative, there would be no executive order requiring the adoption of TQM. Quality would be accomplished by example and promoted by success stories.

Many of those examples would come from the Defense Department, which saw TQM in much the same light as did its contractors--as a valuable management philosophy and a set of quantitative tools and techniques that should be widely disseminated. DoD committed the resources and internal expertise in the late 1980s to provide management directives and guidance, self-assessment processes and training materials to DoD organizations wanting to start down the TQM path. NASA did much the same, focusing on creating a high-profile management commitment to quality that encouraged contractors to be certified practitioners of TQM.