Saturday, December 8, 2012

Total Quality Management (TQM) in the Textile Industry

Total Quality Management (TQM)

Introduction:
In the 1950s, the Japanese asked W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician and management theorist, to help them improve their war torn economy. By implementing Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM), Japan experienced dramatic economic growth. In the 1980s, when the United States began to see a reduction in its own world market share in relation to Japan, American business rediscovered Deming. Quality management experts, Joseph Juran and Philip Crosby, also contributed to the development of TQM theories, models, and tools. TQM is now practiced in business as well as in government, the military, education, and in non-profit organizations including libraries (Jurow & Barnard, 1993).

TOTAL quality Management strives towards the achievement of quality in everything one does. Quality means conformance to customer requirements. In to-days highly competitive economy, business must face the challenge of continually improving the quality of the goods or services.TQM involves everyone in the organization. It aims at standardizing and improving all process in the organization. The function of quality has evolved from more product inspection to an all-encompassing TQM. It is no longer just a Technical function; it has become a management discipline.

In a manufacturing organization, TQM generally starts by sampling a random selection of the product. The sample is then tested for things that matter to the real customers. The causes of any failures are isolated, secondary measures of the production process are designed, and then the causes of the failure are corrected. The statistical distributions of important measurements are tracked. When parts' measures drift out of the error band, the process is fixed. The error band is usually tighter than the failure band. The production process is thereby fixed before failing parts can be produced.

It's important to record not just the measurement ranges, but what failures caused them to be chosen. In that way, cheaper fixes can be substituted later, (say, when the produce is redesigned), with no loss of quality. After TQM has been in use, it's very common for parts to be redesigned so that critical measurements either cease to exist, or become much wider. The concept of controlling quality of output product has been accepted in most of the progressive units. Over the years the movement of Quality control; Statistical Quality Control; Total Quality Control; Quality Assurance and now Total Quality Management, the latest phase in the field, encompassing earlier phases and adding few more dimensions.

Evolution:
The philosophy of Total Quality Management is evolved, with the change in market conditions and customer requirements time to time.

Quality --- Quality Control --- Static Quality Control --- Total Quality Control --- Quality Assurance --- Total Quality Management.

Definition:

Quality:
Good Quality does not necessarily mean high quality. It means a predictable degree of uniformity and dependability at low cost, which suits to the market.

Total Quality Management:
A cost effective system for integrating the continuous quality improvements of people at all levels in an organization to deliver product services, which ensure customer satisfaction.

The concept of bringing a quality focus to every aspect of an operation from raw materials received to accounting invoice accuracy.

Company wide quality management system involving all employees in activities aimed at improvement of product quality, production process and services.

Dimensions of Quality: 

 










Objectives of TQM:
Total Quality requires management practices to shift towards a new form. It includes these components:

1. Customer needs, not production, are focus.
2. The system becomes more horizontal with everyone working towards a single goal, to serve the customer bette.
3. Every one is considered in decision-making.
4. Employee empowerment and responsibility replace rigid policies and procedures.
5. Cooperation across function is frequent.
6. Team takes on some of the roles of departments.
7. Workers are cross-trained and their jobs are more flexible.

The most common pit-falls in Total Quality Management:

1. The TQM approach is not focused
The company fails to identify the key factors that represent quality strategic objectives are not considered.

2. The efforts is stifled by bur accuracy and paper work
Quality becomes an added burden rather than an integrated aspect of operations. The principles of TQM such as simplification and cycle time improvement are not applied to the quality process itself.

3. Using TQM as a “Quick – fix”
The company is in trouble and TQM viewed as a way to quickly solve a variety if problem. Managers look for short – term results and are frustrated when they aren’t quickly achieved. The program is abandoned and the efforts wasted.

4. Data is hard to obtain and use
TQM is not based on facts because people within the company don’t have the right data with which to make decisions. Too much data can often be as detrimental as too little.

5. Intra company conflicts slow down TQM
Staff departments in particulars are reluctant to give up their “territories”. As a result the cross-functional approach required by TQM becomes impossible.

6. Poor planning derails TQM
Sometimes a company uses an “off the shelf” approach to TQM, often sold by a consultant. Managers don’t realize the extent to which TQM must be customized for each company.

7. Measuring the wrong thing
The company fails to focus on characteristics that actually drive quality. It ignores the fact that these blemishes are irrelevant to customers, who are much more interested in on-time delivery.

8. Management can be an obstacle to TQM success
Rather than leading the quality effort, managers simply talk about it. Not wanting to make a commitment, pass responsibility to lower levels, or establish fact-oriented measures, they impede the implementation of TQM. Their subordinates go frustrated and abandon quality efforts.

Total Quality Management Model:
In order to develop a systematic approach to TQM planning and implementation, a good strategy is to take a book at companies which are recognized quality leaders in the field. Especially firms that have been awarded the prestigious Malcoln Baldrige Quality Award, generally recognized as a superior achievement in the field of Total Quality.

1. Leadership
Quality values and customer orientation flow from senior managers. It’s important that they commit themselves to quality and that they devise the systems and strategies for achieving it. It’s especially important that senior managers be visible in their quality activities. They should be active in quality planning, and should take the lead in communication quality goals to the organization.

2. Information and Analysis
This is the brain center of the quality improvement process TQM emphasizes management by fact. Reliable and timely data are the key ingredients in tracking quality and making improvements in process.

To achieve total quality, your company must consider a wide range of information: customer, product and service performance operation, market dynamics competition, costs and supplier data.

3. Strategic Quality Planning
The idea of TQM is not for quality to become your company’s sole focus. Rather, you must formulate your business plans in such a way that quality contributes to productivity and ultimately to financial improvement.

Total quality cannot be added after you have determined long term or short term plans. The idea only makes sense when it is in corporate into evaluation of projection market conditions, competitive climate and financial situation.

4. Human Resources development and Management
The success of you TQM effort will ultimately depend on the utilization of Human resource. Your employees are the ones who will implement quality process, who will make sure quality levels are maintained, and who will contribute ideas for continuous improvement.

5. Management of Process Quality
TQM continually return to the idea of “process”. This is because of the emphasis on designing it on. The answer to all quality problems ultimately lies in improving a process or system.

6. Quality and Operational Results
The analysis and improvement of process is an important emphasis of TQM, but only as a means to achieving results. You should never become so caught up in the planning or implementation of TQM that you lose sight of fact that it is a result-oriented approach.

7. Customer Focus and Satisfaction
This is the single most important factor in the Baldrige Award criteria. The reason is that customer focus is what drives all the other aspects of TQM. No company can achieve quality in a vacuum. It is the market place that should determine quality at every level.

Implementation of Total Quality Management:
1. Top management commitment
Sometimes senior manager become enthusiastic about the ideas and benefits of TQM. May be they are being pressed by the customer to adopt a quality program. May be they thinking TQM will add the company prestige. TQM fails in the companies where enthusiastic but no commitment.


2. Learn about TQM
Senior manager should spend time learning about TQ concepts before moving ahead being by reading book and articles about various factors of TQM. Then send related managers to workshop or presentation onto. They may be available through local business organization. Finally talk to companies, which have already had experience of TQM learn what’s worked for them and what aren’t.
Some companies use consultant to learn as much as they can about TQM.

3. Decide on a quality vision
It is important that you consider your quality vision very carefully. This is much more than a simple slogan. It’s a statement that links manager, employees, customers and suppliers.

The quality vision is a simple statement that organizer your companies approach to quality. It should be generally bring to apply to every aspect to your company operation, but specific enough to pinpoint the aspects of quality that you want to emphasis.

Considerations while formulating vision statement

  • Consult with representative from all parts of the company. Every one should feel they have had some input.

  • Keep it short. It should summarize, not explain.

  • Make it customer oriented: the customer determine quality.

  • Some companies include reference to the market and competitors, emphasizing that quality means leadership.

  • Don’t make it too general. ”Excellence” was a popular term a few years ago. But what does it mean?

  • · Focus on priorities.


4. Establish a TQM team
This is the group that will oversee the actual implementation of TQM in your form. It should include the chief executive, representatives from line and staff departments, employee representation and union officials if a union involved.

The team then conducts in department research and discussion about two topics.

  • How TQ conspectus apply to individual departments and functions.

  • What needs to be done to implement TQM across function lines. Specific plans for corresponding cooperation will need to be made.



5. Establish quality policies and procedures
The team will next examine how to apply the quality vision to the actual way the compotation business in run. You will not alter all your company polices overnight. This should be a process carried out by the TQM this overtime and on a priority basis.

6. Set quality objectives
Never implement TQM is a vacuum, excepting that the ideas eill automatically yield results. Always keep on eye on the objectives that you went to achieve.

  1. It provides a measuring stick; managers and employees can measure TQM results against a realistic set of guidelines.

  2. It reduces unrealities expectation. By forming on long-range goals, objective gets ready of the “quick-fix” mentality that lead to frustration.

  3. It motivates. If the entire company in working towards reducing defects or achieving some bench marking, there is a sprit of accomplishment that boost motivation.


Some times that may include in TQM objections.

  • Increasing productivity.

  • Lowering specific cost, such as warranty or scrap costs.

  • Implementing specific quality control.

  • Penetrating new markets.

  • Stepping up the rate of innovation inside the company.

  • Cutting specific cycle times.


7. Set action plan
Then step applies to both the policy and quality project aspects of TQM. Essentially it refers to the question of who, what, when and how. The QTM team should plan to then over part of its duties to quality team or individuals who will address specific areas.

TQM in the Textile Industry:
Outline The involvement of the textile industry within the four principles varies widely, not only among the different sections of the industry, but also within each of these principles. The perceived level of involvement within each section of the industry, Provide brief descriptions of some of the activities in each process area of the industry that help develop the four principles of TQM.

Fiber Forming
Statistical process control and process improvement efforts are strong in the man-made fiber industry. This industry conducts much metrics-based analysis. Leading companies are starting to form extensive partnerships with customers who employ team concepts. Such tools as QFD are used to enhance these partnerships. The leading companies also are becoming flatter organizations that emphasize a team concept of managing, instead of a hierarchical one. Decision-making in these organizations is given to an empowered operational level of employees.

Spinning
In yarn facilities that have more advanced TQM systems, the development of the associates through education and training for such things as technical certification, statistical process and quality control, and team development, occur on a frequent basis. This training and education is provided both within the company and by outside sources such as a community college. In these facilities, elaborate process improvement programs based on employee involvement have been established. Natural work teams and process improvement teams are used to conduct the process improvements. Customer partnerships and satisfaction surveys are also employed.

Knitting
In some plants in the knitting industry, employees are empowered through training in statistical process control and just -in-time manufacturing, to improve the manufacturing process. Process simplification is conducted through quality audits that identify problems and critical path decisions. Other plants have developed process improvement teams to conduct work in the process area. As in yarn, customer partnerships are also a trend.

Weaving
ln the weaving industry, there are companies that employ statistical process control and value-added analysis. Teams are used in these companies to aid in customer service and quality. A specific example of customer focus is one company's development of a 48-hour customer service program to help eliminate, in person, any problems that arise within their products. This company also employs teams to build partnerships with customers.

Dyeing and Finishing
The use of statistical process control and value-added analysis is also employed in this industry of the textile value-added chain. Work-flow and cycle- time analysis is employed in companies more advanced in their TQM system. Cross- functional teams in areas of customer service and quality improvement are also used.

Apparel
In advanced apparel companies, natural work teams that employ quality improvement tools and measurements are in use. In such advanced companies, partnerships with customers and customer satisfaction surveys aid in improving customer focus. The empowerment of employees is increased in these plants by restructuring the organization from I a hierarchical form to a flatter, team-based form.

Cost of Quality:
Quality means consistency in meeting customer expectation. The cost of quality is the cost of yarn that met those expectations, combined with the costs that result when you fail to meet them.

Elements of cost of quality:

1. Prevention
This is the cost of anything you do to prevent quality error or to maintain the consistency of quality .it begins with the orientation and training that you provide to new employees. It can include some part of cost of parching equipments of maintained of designing, planning and engraining.

2. Inspection and appraisal
These costs begin with the inspection of purchased goods and materials. The cost of inspection through the work process and finished goods is included related documentation and record keeping as well as the calibration of test equipment and laboratory changes add to these costs. This category also includes surveying customer satisfaction levels especially in-service companies.

3. Internal failure costs
These are the costs that occur when a quality defect is detected before it reaches the customer. Most directly they include scrap and network costs. But the cost of reinspection of idle time because of quality failure, and the related administrative costs, would also be included.

4. External failure costs
These are all the related to quality defects that reach the customer. Some are direct returns warranty and replacement costs. Field repairs the cost of responding to complaints. Others are indirect roles cost because of dissatisfied customer, damage to representation and good will, the cost of liability insurances.


Conclusion:
As according to the present market senario, quality plays a major role at an optimum or approachable cost. For which quality management is very important for the process. The TQM totally involves active participation and good management support for achieving high integrated quality of the product or service, which means good team work influences Total Quality Management for good penetration and reputation in the market.

References:
1) Total Quality Management – John M. Kelly.
2) Quality Samurai – T.R.Natarajan, Edwina Pio.
3) Total Quality Management an Over View – Sushil, IIT, Delhi – NCUTE,
4) Technological and Managerial Innovations towards quality concept, Dr. K.K. Goswami,man nade textiles in india, feb 1999. Page 64.
5) DiMattia, E. A., Jr. (1993). Total quality management and servicing users through remote access technology. "Electronic Library," 11(3), 187-191. (EJ 465 770).
5 Textile Technology: Total Quality Management (TQM) in the Textile Industry Total Quality Management (TQM) Introduction: In the 1950s, the Japanese asked W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician and management the...
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