TQM: So Much Larger Than Quality

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

A Roundtable Discussion with the I-Connect007 Editorial Team

Sit down to a conversation with industry pioneers like Happy Holden and Dan Feinberg, then add TQM proponent Barry Matties to the table, and continuous improvement eventually becomes the topic. In this roundtable discussion, the group turns to the subjects of legacy and the impact of TQM on quality, management, and business operations.

Nolan Johnson: Happy, does TQM matter today?

Happy Holden: Yes, it does. But with TQM, you can’t understand how to live it through just one course, a lecture, or even reading a book. We failed with TQM a couple of times at HP. Finally, John Young, who was president of HP at the time, reached out to W. Edwards Deming. Deming said he’d work with HP only if Young and all his VPs and operations managers were in the front row. TQM and Six Sigma programs are inspired by top-down management leadership; they're not pushed up from the bottom.

Deming emphasized that to learn TQM, you had to immerse yourself in it four times. We came up with an acronym, LUTI, which meant “learn, use, teach, inspect.” First you learn with your boss as the teacher. Then, your manager gives you a project for the “use” portion. Next, you teach it to your subordinates, and then you coach each of your subordinates on an individual project. The key was going through it four times.

It's been 45 years and I still believe in the process with TQM.

Eventually, we eliminated the final step of “inspect” by focusing on quality tests. Operators would say, “I don't think this process is working right but I don't have any tools to measure it.” So, we invented quality tests that operators could perform on the PCBs as they built them; if the test failed, they shut down the process and got the engineer, because something wasn't working right. It's interesting how few tests are developed for operators to determine the quality of a process.

As we eliminated final inspection and focused on the first pass yield electrical test, we moved everybody to the front of our process. We had to inspect all the artwork coming in because there were so many problems with the DFM portion of the printed circuit board design.

Johnson: This certainly sounds like it could be a contemporary problem as well.

Holden: Forty years after we first embraced TQM, nothing has changed in terms of the need for continuous improvement and measures of performance. We certainly have the Japanese companies continuing to live it.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the July 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.