ISO: International Standards organization.
TQM: Total Quality Management.
After the Industrial revolution in Europe, the world started shrinking. The world started becoming a ‘Global village’.
The new technology, more and more knowledge of the natural science, new resources, made it easy to ‘Produce’ many things on ‘Mass scale’ in every Industry.
New problems arose with the ‘Mass production’. The problem of bringing uniformity in every production became the most critical. The term ‘uniformity’ became a keyword throughout the world in all the disciplines of the society.
The pressure due to the want of uniform measuring system, uniform quality, uniform quantity, forced the world trade, production and manufacturing process, towards ‘Standardization’ of as many things as possible.
To standardize a thing, one needs to ‘Quantify’ it properly. Other physical parameters of a product are ‘Quantifiable’, but how to ‘quantify the Quality’? was the main teasing question for the experts?
ISO tried to make a breakthrough by ‘Standardizing’ maximum production processes. It helped, to a lot extent, to bring ‘awareness’ in all industries, that, it’s the need of the time to ‘standardize’ maximum ‘processes’. But, still, the question of ‘Quantifying’ the ‘Quality’ was not solved. The earlier approach of ‘controlling’ the ‘Quality’ lost its essence due to the ‘Experience’ gained by that time, about ‘controls’. By maximizing controls, it was observed and proved, that, the rejection increased.
The limitations in defining ‘Quality’ surfaced more and more, as ‘Quality’ is Relative. What a person disqualifies and the other qualifies is very much unpredictable.
This proved the importance of ‘Human’ factor, involved in every production process and still neglected in the ‘Standardization process’. This ‘Human’ factor is beyond the limit of ‘Predictability’ and hence ‘Standardization’.
This was well observed by Mr. Deming. He made a breakthrough by defining Quality from the point of view of a ‘Customer’. If a customer, a consumer is satisfied because of the exact service rendered by a product, then the product can be called as a ‘Quality Product’.Mr.Deming layed the foundations of T Q M
The Human face, Human factor, which was missing earlier in the process of achieving ‘Quality’; came into the process in the form of a ‘Customers’, Human face’.
Now, since, the ‘Quality’ was defined; it made easy, ‘by reverse engineering method’ to look at each and every process. The concept of ‘customer satisfaction’ applied to each ‘process’ in the form of ‘Internal customer satisfaction’ made it further easy to build ‘Quality’ as an ‘Inherent’ property of a product. The problem of ‘Controlling’ the ‘Quality’, putting the managers under heavy ‘stress’; was solved.
A detailed study & application of TQM system will also help the construction industry to a great extent.
