Dr. W. Edwards Deming was a foundational influence on what became Total Quality Management, though the system draws from multiple thinkers, including Walter Shewhart and Joseph Juran.

Although TQM has a lot in common with the Six Sigma methodology, they are not the same. Total Quality Management focuses on ensuring that process standards deliver a great customer experience, while Six Sigma is designed to reduce defects. The practice of TQM is about holding all parties involved in the production process accountable for the quality of the final product or service. It revolves around a customer-focused desire to achieve long-term success.

Let's look at how.

8 Principles of Total Quality Management

Customer Focus: Under TQM, managers have the responsibility to understand and anticipate the customer's needs. The goal is to exceed customer expectations consistently.

Total Employee Involvement: Managers seek to involve every person at all levels so that they happily work to achieve the organization's long-term success. The Total Quality Management paradigm recognizes that the employees closest to the work are in the best position to improve it.

Process-Centered: Leaders understand that a goal is achieved faster when activities and associated resources are managed as a unified process. All efforts are focused on process rather than blaming people for problems.

Systems Thinking: Further, managers see interrelated processes as a single system and manage them accordingly. Many opportunities for improvement are found at the intersection of processes.

Strategic and Systematic Approach: The organization's strategic objectives are not lost with the focus on processes. In fact, TQM leaders seek to align the organization around strategic goals.

Continual Improvement: The search for perfection is never-ending. Incremental improvements are of great value, especially when everyone is contributing. Even small changes can have significant results.

The challenge is making continual improvement visible. When small changes happen across dozens of teams but aren't tracked or measured, leadership can't see the cumulative effect -- and the program loses executive support because it looks like nothing is happening.

Fact-based Decision Making: Decisions are made based on data and observation, not hunches and assumptions.

Communication: Transparency breeds trust and trust spurs engagement and creativity. Leaders should be open with employees as much as possible and encourage a two-way exchange of ideas and data.

The History of TQM

The root of Total Quality Management goes back further than one might think. Some trace the principles and practice of TQM way back to the early 20th century when Frederick Taylor wrote his Principles of Scientific Management, which called for a consistent pattern of performing tasks and inspecting finished work to stop defective products from getting to the customer. In the 1920s, Walter Shewhart developed statistical process controls that could be applied to predict quality at any point in the production process. He created the control chart commonly used today for managing operations of all types.

During the '20s and '30s, Shewhart was a mentor of the aforementioned, William Deming, who developed statistical process control theories that he would eventually use to help the US Census department in the early 1940s. After WWII, Deming's ideas helped Japan change its reputation for shoddy products into one of unparalleled quality products.

Total Quality Management started to pick up steam in the US in the late '70s and early '80s. By 1988 Congress had created the Federal Quality Institute to highlight the need for quality control in business and reward organizations for successful implementations. While TQM began in manufacturing, like its subsequent methodologies (ISO, Six Sigma, Lean manufacturing, and others), it was applied effectively to finance, healthcare, and other fields.

TQM Tools and Methods

TQM is a philosophy, but it relies on specific tools to put its principles into practice. Most of these tools predate the TQM label -- they come from the statistical quality control tradition that Shewhart and Deming built -- and many are shared with Lean and Six Sigma.

Control charts (also called process behavior charts) are the backbone of fact-based decision making in TQM. A control chart plots process data over time with statistically calculated limits that distinguish normal variation from signals that something has changed. Without control charts, teams react to noise -- chasing explanations for random fluctuation -- or miss real signals buried in the data. Shewhart invented the control chart in the 1920s, and it remains one of the most powerful and underused tools in quality management.

PDSA cycles (Plan-Do-Study-Act) provide TQM's engine for continual improvement. Rather than designing a perfect solution upfront, teams form a hypothesis, test it on a small scale, study the results, and decide whether to adopt, adapt, or try something different. Deming championed PDSA as the practical method for learning your way to better processes.

Fishbone diagrams (Ishikawa diagrams) give teams a structured way to brainstorm the potential causes of a quality problem across categories -- people, process, equipment, materials, environment, policies. They're especially useful when a cross-functional team needs to surface causes that no single person would identify alone.

Pareto analysis applies the 80/20 principle: a small number of causes typically account for most quality problems. Charting defect types or complaint categories by frequency helps teams focus where the impact will be greatest rather than spreading effort thin.

5 Whys is the simplest root cause analysis technique -- ask "why" repeatedly until you reach the systemic cause, not just the symptom. It's fast, requires no special training, and reinforces TQM's principle of fixing processes rather than blaming people.

Benchmarking compares an organization's performance against peers or best-in-class standards. In TQM, benchmarking isn't about copying -- it's about understanding the gap between where you are and where the best performers are, then using that gap to set improvement priorities.

Flowcharting and process mapping make the steps in a process visible so teams can identify waste, redundancy, and handoff points where quality breaks down. You can't improve a process you haven't defined, and many quality problems become obvious once the actual flow of work is drawn out.

These tools work together. A team might use a Pareto chart to identify the biggest quality problem, a fishbone diagram to brainstorm causes, 5 Whys to dig into the most likely root cause, a PDSA cycle to test a countermeasure, and a control chart to verify that the fix actually worked. TQM's power comes from using these methods as an integrated system rather than deploying them in isolation.

How TQM Compares to Lean and Six Sigma

TQM, Lean, and Six Sigma share common DNA -- all three focus on improving quality, reducing waste, and engaging people in making processes better. But they emphasize different things and have different origins.

TQM is a management philosophy centered on building a quality-first culture across the entire organization. It emerged from the statistical quality control work of Shewhart, Deming, and Juran in the mid-twentieth century. TQM's focus is broad: every person, every process, every interaction should be oriented toward quality and customer value. Its strength is cultural breadth. Its weakness, historically, has been a lack of specificity about implementation -- which contributed to TQM being declared a "fad" by organizations that adopted the philosophy without building the management system to sustain it.

Lean is a management system rooted in the Toyota Production System. Its core focus is eliminating waste and improving flow -- making processes faster, smoother, and more reliable by removing steps that don't create value. Lean brings a structured daily management system (huddles, gemba walks, leader standard work, standard work) that TQM often lacked. Many organizations that moved from TQM to Lean did so because Lean provided the operational structure to put quality principles into daily practice.

Six Sigma is a methodology focused on reducing variation and defects using advanced statistical analysis. Developed at Motorola and scaled at GE, Six Sigma provides specialized tools -- designed experiments, regression analysis, hypothesis testing -- for particularly complex, data-intensive problems. Its DMAIC framework (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) gives teams a rigorous problem-solving structure.

In practice, these methodologies aren't competitors. Mature organizations borrow from all three. TQM provides the quality-first cultural foundation. Lean provides the management system and daily improvement discipline. Six Sigma provides the statistical toolkit for tough problems. The organizations that get the best results don't argue about which methodology is "right" -- they build an improvement system that draws on the right tools for the problem at hand.

Implementation Hurdles

While no leader would say that they don't value quality and aren't focused on the customer, implementing the principles of TQM is more challenging than it may seem. There are a few factors that keep organizations from seeing success with quality management.

The hurdles are predictable. Organizations get focused on improving individual processes and lose sight of how the system operates as a whole. Managers who are philosophically committed to employee involvement struggle to actually delegate authority. Training in quality methods gets treated as an expense rather than an investment, and the first budget cut strips it out. Cross-functional collaboration sounds good in a meeting but stalls when teams have competing priorities and no shared system for managing improvement work. And goal alignment -- connecting daily improvement activity to strategic objectives -- is something nearly every organization says it values and very few actually achieve.

How KaiNexus Supports Total Quality Management

TQM principles are straightforward. Practicing them at scale -- across departments, facilities, and thousands of employees -- is where organizations stall. KaiNexus provides the infrastructure to operationalize TQM by solving the specific hurdles described above.

Structured improvement workflows. TQM depends on disciplined problem solving, but without a shared system, every department runs PDSA cycles differently -- different formats, different tracking, different definitions of "done." KaiNexus standardizes the improvement workflow across the organization while remaining flexible enough to accommodate different methodologies.

Visibility across levels. One of the biggest TQM hurdles is the gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what's actually happening on the front line. KaiNexus gives leaders real-time visibility into improvement activity at every level -- without requiring manual status reports. Smart notifications keep work moving and ensure managers can respond to questions and new ideas promptly.

Strategic alignment. TQM fails when improvement work is disconnected from organizational objectives. In KaiNexus, strategic goals cascade from executive level through departments to individual contributors. Every improvement can be tagged to the objective it supports, so leaders can see whether the work happening across the organization is aligned with what matters most.

Automatic impact tracking. Leaders who can't quantify the ROI of TQM eventually stop funding it. KaiNexus tracks the financial and operational impact of every improvement -- short-term and long-term -- and rolls it up automatically. No more assembling quarterly reports from spreadsheets to justify the program.

Communication and knowledge sharing. TQM's communication principle requires more than open-door policies. KaiNexus creates a shared language and process for improvement across the organization. Every improvement becomes part of a searchable knowledge repository, so teams can find what's already been solved instead of starting from scratch.

Data visualization. Fact-based decision making requires tools that make data actionable. KaiNexus supports control charts, bowling charts, X-matrices, Kanban boards, and impact dashboards -- all connected to the underlying improvement work rather than existing as standalone reports.

Recognition. Momentum in TQM comes from recognizing people who contribute. KaiNexus includes built-in recognition features and improvement broadcasting so that successes are visible across the organization, encouraging participation from teams that haven't yet engaged.

For further reading on Total Quality Management, we highly recommend Quality Management for Organizational Excellence: Introduction to Total Quality by David L. Goetsch and Stanley Davis.

TQM Is a System. It Needs a System to Support It.

The eight principles of Total Quality Management describe a culture. But culture doesn't sustain itself without infrastructure -- a way to make improvement work visible, track it to completion, measure its impact, and keep it aligned with strategic goals. Organizations that practice TQM with spreadsheets and email eventually find that the principles are right but the execution can't keep up.

KaiNexus was built for this problem. See KaiNexus in action →

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Total Quality Management (TQM)?

Total Quality Management is a management system focused on embedding quality into every aspect of an organization's operations. It emphasizes customer focus, full employee involvement, process-centered thinking, fact-based decision making, and continual improvement. TQM holds everyone accountable for quality, not just a quality department.

What is the difference between TQM and Six Sigma?

TQM is a broad management philosophy focused on building a quality-first culture across the entire organization. ka is a more specific methodology that uses statistical analysis to reduce defects and process variation. Organizations often use both -- TQM as the cultural framework and Six Sigma tools for targeted analytical work.

What are the 8 principles of TQM?

The eight principles are customer focus, total employee involvement, process-centered thinking, systems thinking, strategic and systematic approach, continual improvement, fact-based decision making, and communication. These principles work together as an integrated system rather than as independent practices.

What are common challenges in implementing TQM?

The most common challenges are losing sight of the whole system while improving individual processes, managers being unwilling to delegate, underinvesting in training, cross-functional friction, and failing to align daily improvement work with strategic objectives. Most of these challenges stem from lacking the infrastructure to practice TQM at scale.

Does TQM require specialized software?

TQM can be practiced without software at small scale. As organizations grow and improvement work spans multiple departments and facilities, tracking progress, measuring impact, maintaining strategic alignment, and sustaining communication become difficult without a purpose-built platform. Organizations that scale TQM successfully typically use improvement management software to keep the work visible and accountable.