Total Quality Management in Mechanical System Design

Abstract

In today's competitive environment, the age‐old belief of many companies that “the customer is always right” has a new twist. In order to survive, companies are focusing their entire organization on customer satisfaction. The approach followed for ensuring customer satisfaction is known as total quality management (TQM). The challenge is to “manage” so that the “total” and the “quality” are experienced in an effective manner. Many factors contribute to the success of the quality consideration in engineering or mechanical design. This chapter presents some of the important aspects of TQM considered useful to mechanical system design. TQM is a useful tool for application during the design phase. It presents some basic and general aspects of TQM under four distinct sections. Three individuals (i.e.,W. E. Deming, J. M. Juran, and P. B. Crosby) have played an instrumental role in the development of TQM.