Significant Key Approaches To Organisations To Manage And Improve Their Operations And Products



Significant Key Approaches To Organisations To Manage And Improve Their Operations And Products

Introduction

While management is considered as relatively immature compared to other social sciences, the field has been bombarded with “fads” see, for example, Carson et al. (1999). In summary, the different management theories presented over the years, of which some could be argued to be management fads, have been criticised for having four major defects. These major defects of the management theory are the following:

it is constitutionally incapable of self-criticism;

its terminology and industry-specific jargon rather confuse than inform;

it rarely rises above common sense; and

it is replete with fads and plagued with contradictions that would be intolerable in other scientific disciplines (Carson et al., 1999).

During the last decades, quality management has been put forward by a number of its promoters as a new management theory, see, for example, Foley (2004). However, the description of what quality management is differs. Quality management can be described as a management revolution, a revolutionary philosophy of management, a new way of thinking about the management of organisations, a paradigm shift, a comprehensive way to improve total organisational performance, an alternative to management by control or as a framework for competitive management (Foley, 2004). Despite the high aims of promoters of quality management, the failures of organisations trying to implement a successful quality management programme have been well documented, see Brown et al. (1994), Eskildson (1994), Harari (1997), Cao et al. (2000) or Nwabueze (2001). These failures have led some authors to question whether some concepts in the area of quality management are fads, see, for example, van der Wiele et al. (2000).

Although considerable progress has been made in the field of quality management in general and in TQM, six sigma and Kaizen in particular, many important issues remain unexplored concerning the similarities and differences between these concepts. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to describe similarities and differences between TQM, six sigma and Kaizen. In specific, similarities and differences concerning areas such as the methodologies, tools, effects and criticism are illuminated in this paper. Furthermore, an overall description of each concept is contributed in this paper. Moreover, different management theories have been criticised for having four major defects, see above. Hence, the intention with this paper is also to present criticism of each concept (point 1) and inform, rather than confuse the reader about the similarities and differences of each concept (point 2), see Carson et al. (1999).

Quality management concepts

Total quality management (TQM)

Quality has been an important issue for organisations for many years. The early focus on quality evolved from inspection to quality control and later to quality assurance, according to Dale (1999). During the 1990s, TQM evolved as a common term among organisations. Different definitions of TQM have been presented over the years. Dahlgaard et al. (1998) view TQM as:

… a corporate culture characterised by increased customer satisfaction through continuous improvement, in which all employees in the firm actively ...