Total Quality Management Objective of this paper is to discuss the concept of TQM (Total Quality Management) using the Deming's 14 points to illustrate how business and education integrate TQM to deliver high quality product and services. The paper further chooses two of the Deming's 14 points to distinguish how business and education implement concept of TQM in their business operations.

Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management philosophy and paradigm that focus on a continuous improvement approach of doing business. Typically, TQM embraces wide scope of management approach that focuses on the strategy to manage people and organizations. Using a new management model, TQM paradigm focuses on quality and evolves from continuous improvement, which has become the new and main dimension of doing business. Under TQM paradigm, the quality of product and services predominates.

The total quality management embraces the following philosophies:

Focusing on meeting customers needs by delivering high quality product and services at a costs that would deliver value to customers,

Driving quest by continuing delivering quality improvement in all operations,

Emphasize on high-level participation and teamwork of all employees.

Moreover, TQM generally believes on the universal quality management focusing on the following beliefs:

Measuring quality is the satisfaction of customers and owners,

Quality improvement within an organization must be continuous,

Analyzing the strategies to enhance quality improvement when producing product and services,

Employee skills and development as well as employee improvement are very critical to enhance quality improvement and innovation,

Sustainable total quality management may not be realizable without visible, active and enable leadership at all levels.

TQM is credited to Edward Deming, an American statistician who assisted Japanese manufacturing company to rise to the top. Deming's principles are credited to the success of Toyota, Ritz Carlton, Harley-Davidson, Proctor & Gamble, and other leading organizations. Deming theory of management is based on fourteen principles that could be employed by organizations to enhance quality improvement.

Deming's fourteen points are as follows,

1. Creating constant improvement to improve the quality of product and services. The aim is to stay in business, provide jobs as well as remain competitive.

2. Need to adopt new philosophy and tolerating poor quality. In the era of economic age, western management must be awakened to take a new responsibility and implement changes in leadership;

3. Crease to depend on inspection in order to achieve quality. Eliminate the need to adopt inspection on a mass basis to deliver quality.

4. Minimize total costs and end awarding business on price tag alone. There is also a need to seek long-term suppliers relationships by reducing number of suppliers and build loyalty and trusts.

5. Always constantly improve process of production, system of planning, as well as improving on quality and productivity in order to cut costs.

6. An organization needs to institute training and development on the job as well as instituting modern method of supervision.

7. Always encourage employees to voice out to drive out the fear so that all employees will be able to work for the company without fear. Supervision should be employed to make people do a better job. Supervision is required to enhance effective production of goods and services.

8. There is a need to break down the barrier in all departments. Employee in sales, research, marketing, production, and finance and procurement department must be able to work as a team.

9. Eliminate exhortation, and slogan within the workforce. Workforce should produce with zero defects to improve productivity.

10. Eliminate work standards based on the numerical quotas on the factory floor. There is also a need to substitute leadership.

11. Remove barriers that would rob employee from their hourly work. Management by objective must be implemented.

12. There is a need to institute various education programs as well as enhancing self-improvement for everyone.

13. Place everybody within the company to accomplish the transformation process and design a structure to put everyone to the top.

14. Put all employees within the system in order to accomplish transformation.

In the contemporary business environment, business and educational institution have started to adopt Deming's fourteen points to deliver high quality product and services. While business uses the Deming's 14 points to produce high quality products and services to deliver value to customer, educational institutions are also employing Deming's 14 points to deliver high quality education that would empowered students to become effective employees in their various working place after graduation. The paper compares and contrasts application of Deming's 14 points in business and education.

In the construction business, gone are the days when quality improvement is not important. Presently, owners of construction work are always demanding for high quality work to be delivered at lower costs. The new attitude is to implement the total quality management by producing high quality product as well as keeping the costs down. English (2011) describes how the Deming's 14 Points has assisted business to achieve information quality . The author argues that information quality is no longer an option in a contemporary business environment. Information has become a strategic tool to manage organizational resources. Typically, poor quality information could cause a downstream in a business operation.
The paper uses Deming's points 1, and 6 to compare the application of Deming's principles in business and education.

1. Creating constant improvement to improve the quality of product and services. The aim is to stay in business, provide jobs as well as remain competitive.

In the contemporary business environment, production of high quality product is a critical tool that organizations employ to stay in business. Businesses have realized that they need to constantly deliver high quality products at reasonable prices. To improve on the quality of product and services, businesses have adopted a strategy by implementing research and development to produce high quality product. One of the typical examples of businesses that constantly improve on their product and service is Bechtel. Typically, Bechtel started the TQM in 1987. The TQM initiative was obtained from customer's feedback. Using the customer feedback, the company discarded the old way of doing business adopted new strategy to do business.

Apple Inc. has also continuously adopted TQM in its business model. Yearly, Apple Inc. spends several millions of dollars to improve on the company products and services. For example, Apple has been above the competitors by constantly improving on the quality of its products and services. Since the introduction of iPhone into the market, the company has constantly improved on the iPhone product by launching Apple iPhone 1, 2, 3, 4 and iPhone 5. Using this strategy, the company has been able to increase both its annual revenue and its net income. Reid, & Sanders (2010) argues that organizations must not take for granted quality innovation curve. A business that takes quality for granted will quickly go out of business.

Similar to businesses that adopt quality in their business model, quality is also paramount in education. In the United States, there are thousands of public and private post-secondary institutions competing among one another. While businesses across the United States are continuously delivering high quality product at lower price, however, education are delivering high quality education with high price. Top colleges and the universities are charging high tuitions because of the high quality education delivered to students. Higher institutions such as MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Harvard University, Yale University and other top universities charge as high as $40,000 per annum as tuitions. Similar to business, university administrators across the world are beginning to recognize that the TQM has become the major perquisite to the quality education. In 1990s, few departments across various university integrated computer technology to assist in the research and development. In the era of globalization, and advance in technology, educational are continuously using high-level technology to deliver quality education to attract potential students across the world. Similar to business organizations, colleges and universities are constantly improving on the quality of education to deliver value to customer. For example, many universities across the world have introduced digital libraries where students could access university resources from any place in the world. Both businesses and education are constantly improving on the quality of their product and services to attract customers.

6 An organization needs to institute training and development on the job as well as instituting modern method of supervision

Principle 6 of the Deming's fourteen points reveals that business should institute training on the job as well as instituting modern day of supervision. Many organizations have realized that quality education of senior and middle management is a prerequisite to total quality management. However, businesses place more important on the training of upper and middle management than lower subordinates. For example, Microsoft Corporation is one of the largest high tech companies in the world. The company implements different training programs to upper and middle level management and front line supervisors. The company also provides in-house training for non-supervisory employees. The goal of the training is to create environment…