Many organizations struggle with the lack of ability to consistently produce a quality product. They spend an enormous amount of time and money inspecting and sorting through product to try and stop defective products making it to their customers. Unfortunately, when one does make it to the customer, the reaction is often to put in more inspection and rework processes to try and “fix the problem”. But, since it’s often said that 100% inspection is only 80% accurate, this only compounds the problem.

TQM (Total Quality Management) is designed to stop this madness. It is a comprehensive and structured approach that seeks to improve the quality of products and services through ongoing refinements in response to continuous feedback. An organization can define their own standards or they may establish standards, such as those of the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO). The important thing is TQM standards must be based on the customer's point of view.

TQM can be applied to any type of organization; it originated in the manufacturing sector and has since been adapted for use in almost every type of organization imaginable, including schools, highway maintenance, hotel management, and churches.
TQM utilizes the PDCA cycle (plan, do, check, and act) and must be done by a cross-functional team that has ties to the issue. In the planning phase, people define the problem to be addressed, collect relevant data, and ascertain the problem's root cause; in the doing phase, people develop and implement a solution, and decide upon a measurement to gauge its effectiveness; in the checking phase, people confirm the results through analyzing and comparing before-and-after data; in the acting phase, people document their results, inform others about process changes, and make recommendations for the problem to be addressed in the next PDCA cycle

The benefits an organization can expect from using TQM are as follows: