By Ashiq J.A.H and R. Rangaswamy

The first thing to be decided before debating Total Quality Management (TQM) in the future is to define quality. How would one define quality? In today's competitive environment, the answer is not simple and will get more complicated in the future. The straightforward paradigm of the past 10-15 years, defines quality as "Conformance to requirements". The fundamental problem with this definition in the context of the future is that the requirements are subjective. Only the customers can really determine the requirements by their expectations and acceptance of the product or service provided. Businesses in the past could live with such ambiguities in a relatively stable environment where competition was deterministic in terms of understanding the competitor's moves and his quality levels.

Total Quality Management is a philosophy, a set of tools, and a process whose output yields customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. This philosophy and process differs from traditional philosophies and processes in that everyone in the organisation can and must practice it.

Total Quality Management not only connotes the dictum "Do it right the first time all the time" but also a near universal acknowledgement of the role of quality in keeping customers satisfied. However, quality is also about cost, revenues, and profits. Quality plays a key role in keeping costs low, revenues high, and profits robust. The Total Quality Organisation, in recognition of the central role of quality in determining the competitive positioning of the organisation, has comprehensive strategic plans that address the quest for achieving world leading quality and improving on it continually. The pervasive diffusion of total quality management into the various factors of competitiveness has major implications for the direction that TQM will take. The nature of competition in the future will, therefore, be the driver of evolution of TQM and its adoption for an organisation's survival.

Market segmentation is continuously yielding newer and subtle segments. The logical end of this micro level segmentation is a customer segment of Size One. It is important here to understand the driving technologies that have made this possible. This has major implications on how an organisation perceives and delivers quality. The static broad-based quality standards of yesteryears would be an anachronism in the future. Ideally, there would be as many specifications of quality as there are customers. And to add to the excitement, these "infinite" number of specifications should be dynamic, ever changing with the capriciousness of the new age consumer. In this context, could any organisation ever hope to adequately, and with sufficient speed, meet the quality dictates of the customer? The future could, therefore, very well see an era of the "quasumer". The quasumer is a customer who defines, creates and ensures quality in the offering. She would no longer be satisfied with the functional use that a service or product performs.

TQM in the future would ensure that the organisation delivers quality that the quasumer demands, because the quasumer would be willing to pay only for quality as perceived by her and not that of the organisation. The quasumer would create quality by having in his control all the determinants of quality. This goes beyond mass customisation. Mass customisation only ensures the presence of those features that a customer has specified. The "quasumer" will ensure the quality of those features and attributes demanded by him.

With the marketplace being increasingly replaced by the market space, conventional quality control measures would no longer be tolerated. Conventional quality control measures are based on the premise that there is a time lag between reading stimuli from a customer, identifying the problem and its root cause and rectifying the same. In the past, even the most demanding customer did allow for a window period, however small, for the organisation to react. But in the "market space" this window period is non-existent. A dissatisfied customer is no longer a customer. She is not bound by the limitations of distance, transactions and past associations. Her loyalty is governed only by the quality of product or service that is offered. Hence a new approach of "Planning for Quality" at a strategic level and seamlessly integrating it with the operational requirements is a need that the new age TQM has to address.

What kind of organisation would satiate a "quasumer"? This question is even more engaging for manufacturing organisations, where production and consumption are temporally and spatially separate. TQM of the future would need to ensure the diffusion of the quasumer's quality throughout the organisation. It is given that this organisation would be boundaryless, spanning across the extended supply chain. TQM will need to ensure the optimisation of quality---tangible and intangible---across the supply chain. Virtual organisations would be the order of the day as they engage in "distributed dynamic world class manufacturing". This brings us to the concept of "distributed quality". The boundaryless organization will naturally thrive on boundaryless, integrated business processes. Rapid emergence of processes like supply chain management, integrated product design and development, enterprise resource planning, and enterprise quality management are clear pointers in this direction.

TQM would cascade the quasumers' quality throughout the supply chain by means of tools like "dynamic Quality Function Deployment (QFD)". Each member of the supply chain---both vertical and horizontal---would, in real time, receive quality related information relevant to his sphere of activity and would deliver better since he is focused. At the same time, the dynamic QFD would ensure that the overall product or service quality is not compromised in any way. QFD systematises the product's attributes in a matrix diagram, called a House Of Quality, and highlights which attribute is the most important to a customer. This helps the teams throughout the organisation to focus on their goal (customer satisfaction) whenever they are making change decisions.

The age of the "Customer driven company" is gone. The future belongs to the "Customer-Employee Connectivity driven company". For that, the organisation has to be transparent: the customer should be able to see and interact with the organisation and its employees as far back into the supply chain as she requires; the employee should be able to interact seamlessly with the customer so that he understands the customer, delivers quality as perceived by the customer and is delighted when the customer is delighted.

Ashiq J.A.H. and Raman Rangaswamy, School Of Management- I I.T. Bombay.

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