Total Quality Management

This chapter describes the total quality management (TQM) which includes management philosophy and style along with statistical process control (SPC). TQM assumes that, given the chance, workers will perform best when they know and understand the company or process goals. Productivity should not be enforced by rules, regulations, monitoring, performance standards, and other degrading methods. Arbitrary standards, personnel evaluations, and other humiliating tools should not be used to increase production and efficiency from workers. With paper, there are intrinsic tradeoffs in quality. Choices are made about which properties must be decreased in order to improve others. For example, for any type of paper, there is always a choice between tensile and tear strengths. Improving one means decreasing the other. Further SPC or statistical quality control (SQC) involves data collection and analysis, modeling of systems, problem solving, and design of experiments. Once a choice is made, the tools of TQM and SPC can be used to maintain the process, reduce variation, and improve efficiency.