Total quality management, now a well known idea, is a philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes. The idea is that the quality of products and processes is the responsibility of everyone who is involved with the development and/or use of the products or services. TQM involves management, workforce, suppliers, and even customers, in order to meet or exceed customer expectations. The common TQM practices are cross-functional product design, process management, supplier quality management, customer involvement, information and feedback, committed leadership, strategic planning, cross-functional training, and employee involvement. Six Sigma is a business management strategy which seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically expected to be free of defects. TQM’s focus is general improvement by approaching the problem collaboratively and culturally whereas Six Sigma utilizes the efforts of many departments, generally with a statistical approach. It makes use of measuring and analyzing data to determine how defects and differences could be minimized to the level where there are 3.4 defects per million cycles/products.
