If you work with Lean, Six Sigma, or ISO 9001, you are already practising TQM. You just might not be calling it that.

Total Quality Management is the framework that Lean Management, Six Sigma, and ISO 9000 were all built on. It gained significant prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s before being largely superseded by those successor methodologies, but the underlying principles never went away. They got repackaged.

Understanding TQM gives practitioners the "why" behind modern quality frameworks. The four concepts the US Navy documented in 1985 remain the clearest, most actionable summary of what quality management actually requires of an organisation.

What TQM actually means

TQM is an organisation-wide effort to "install and make a permanent climate where employees continuously improve their ability to provide on-demand products and services that customers will find of particular value".

The word "total" carries the weight. TQM says all departments, including sales, marketing, accounting, finance, engineering, and design, are responsible for improving their operations. Quality is embedded in every activity, decision, and customer interaction across the entire organisation.

That distinction matters in practice. When quality belongs to one team, everyone else treats it as someone else's problem. When quality belongs to the organisation, the finance team improving invoice accuracy is doing quality work just as much as the production team reducing defects.

Where TQM came from

TQM accumulated over decades, with each contributor adding a layer.

The Hawthorne experiments. The roots stretch back almost 100 years, when researchers at Western Electric's Hawthorne plants discovered that involving workers in decision-making dramatically improved productivity. This was the first evidence that quality is a people problem as much as a technical one.

Deming and Juran in Japan. The movement gained momentum in the 1950s when quality experts Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran brought statistical control methods and quality management techniques to Japan. Deming promoted the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, based on Walter Shewhart's improvement cycle, emphasising well-defined processes, rigorous measurement, and the involvement of all employees. Juran introduced the "Quality Trilogy" of planning, control, and improvement as the three pillars of effective quality management.

Feigenbaum's Total Quality Control. Armand Feigenbaum was the first to use the term "Total Quality Control," advocating that quality should span the entire organisation, from development through to after-sales service. This was the conceptual leap: quality is a property of the whole system, from design to delivery.

The UK and US formalise TQM. The term TQM itself may have been first coined in the United Kingdom by the Department of Trade and Industry during its 1983 "National Quality Campaign". Two years later, the US Navy branded the effort "Total Quality Management" in 1985, and from there TQM spread throughout the US Federal Government.

Toyota and Kaizen. Japanese companies such as Toyota adopted and refined these concepts, integrating them into their management philosophy. This combination gave rise to a culture of continuous improvement (Kaizen) that would go on to influence production and management methodologies worldwide.

The 5 principles of TQM

Ask five sources for the principles of TQM and you will get five different lists. Juran identifies eight. Atlassian identifies seven. Strip away the variations and five principles appear consistently across all of them:

1. Customer focus. Quality is defined by the customer. A product can meet every internal specification and still fail if customers do not value it. Every process improvement starts with the question: what does the customer need?

2. Continuous improvement. Improvement is permanent. No process is ever finished, and there is no project end date. This is the principle that later became Kaizen as a standalone practice. (SimplicityHub's guide to Kaizen and continuous improvement covers the daily and event-based structures for making this work.)

3. Employee involvement. The people closest to the work understand the problems best. TQM requires that everyone in the organisation participates in improvement, including frontline operators, support staff, and leadership.

4. Data-driven decision making. Opinions about what is going wrong are replaced by measurement. Statistical process control, control charts, and process capability analysis (Cp/Cpk) give teams evidence instead of hunches.

5. Committed leadership. Top management has direct responsibility for quality improvement. TQM cannot be delegated. If leadership treats quality as a department function, the system fails.

The 4 pillars: the Navy's operational framework

The five principles describe what TQM believes. The four pillars describe what it requires you to do. These come from the US Navy's TQM effort in the 1980s, and they remain the most practical translation of TQM philosophy into action:

Pillar What it means in practice
Quality is defined by customer requirements Stop defining quality by internal targets. Ask what the customer actually needs and measure against that.
Top management has direct responsibility Senior leaders set direction, allocate resources, and are accountable for results.
Quality comes from systematic process analysis Defects come from process variation. Analyse the process, find the variation, reduce it.
Improvement is continuous and organisation-wide Every department, every function, every level. There is no "done."

These four concepts are why TQM was more than a quality programme. It was a management system. The Navy paired them with the PDCA cycle, cross-functional teams, steering committees, and the Seven Basic Tools of Quality to make the principles operational.

The 4 steps of TQM: PDCA in practice

The engine that drives TQM improvement is the PDCA cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act):

Plan. Identify the problem. Gather data. Analyse root causes. Define what "better" looks like and how you will measure it.

Do. Implement the change on a small scale. Run a pilot, test a single line, trial with one team.

Check. Measure the results against your plan. Did the change produce the improvement you expected? If the answer is no, investigate why.

Act. If the change worked, standardise it. If it did not, go back to Plan with what you learned.

Once a PDCA cycle produces a confirmed improvement, the SDCA cycle (Standardize-Do-Check-Act) locks it in place. SDCA replaces the "Plan" step with "Standardize," creating a stable baseline before the next PDCA cycle pushes further. Without SDCA, gains erode. Teams improve a process, move on, and six months later the old habits have returned.

TQM tools

TQM draws on a practical toolkit that will be familiar to anyone working in Lean or Six Sigma. Key tools include the PDCA and SDCA cycles, cause-and-effect diagrams, poka-yoke (error-proofing), flowcharts, histograms, and statistical process control (SPC).

Several of these have dedicated resources on SimplicityHub:

These tools originated in TQM, and every successor framework adopted them wholesale.

How TQM became Lean, Six Sigma, and ISO 9001

TQM is considered one of the cornerstones of modern management and serves as the foundation for Lean Management and Six Sigma, which share the same principles: customer focus, variability reduction, continuous improvement, and employee involvement.

The TQM philosophy also inspired the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) model and the ISO 9000 series of international quality management standards. In the US, TQM's influence led to the creation of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in August 1987.

Framework TQM DNA it carries
Lean Waste elimination, continuous improvement (Kaizen), respect for people
Six Sigma Statistical process control, data-driven decisions, DMAIC as a structured PDCA
ISO 9001 Process approach, customer focus, management responsibility, continual improvement
EFQM Leadership, people, strategy, processes, results

If you are working with any of these frameworks, Lean Six Sigma in particular, you are already applying TQM principles under a different name. The vocabulary changed. The substance stayed.

For organisations looking to structure their TQM implementation, Kaizen's model identifies five maturity levels: Level 0 (assess quality costs), Level 1 (contain defects), Level 2 (reduce defects), Level 3 (isolate defects), and Level 4 (zero defects). Most organisations sit at Level 1 or 2. The jump from containment to prevention is where the real cost savings appear.

Why TQM still matters

TQM's greatest practical benefit is the shift Juran described: moving from "little q" product-focused thinking to "big Q" enterprise-focused thinking, reducing the total cost of quality by improving all products, services, and processes.

What started as a manufacturing-focused methodology has evolved into a comprehensive management approach that spans all industries, from healthcare to software development.

The label may have faded, but the framework has not. Every organisation running PDCA cycles, tracking process capability, using control charts, or holding cross-functional improvement meetings is practising TQM. Knowing the source gives you the ability to apply these tools with coherence rather than picking them up piecemeal, because the principles were designed to work together.