As the Chief Guest at the Annual Conference of the Indian Society for Quality (ISQ), held on the 9-10 Dec, 2022, at Chennai, Mr B Muthuraman, (formerly) the Vice Chairman of Tata Steel, made an impassioned appeal to make the practice of quality ‘total’. He emphasised that, although TQM had been in vogue for many years in Indian industry, most companies practice TQM only in production or related activities only, and not in ‘all activities, functions, areas of work’. This was a long overdue message, and, as per the old adage, ‘better late than never’, was nevertheless a signal message to the Indian industry. It was during his tenure that Tata Steel won the Deming Prize, a mammoth achievement, given the fact that the company has major operations in many parts of eastern India, including mines and collieries. It was the first integrated steel plant in the world to have won the award. Tata Steel is a quality practitioners delight. All departments in the company are covered by the quality movement through the application of the Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM). And the company has deployed all the tools and techniques that are currently available in the quality lexicon. Be it value engg, lean, six sigma, TOC, TPM, quality circles, PDCA, vision, mission, values etc., all have been adopted to drive business excellence. Mr Muthuraman suggested in his speech that we should replace the word ‘quality’ with ‘excellence’. This is because quality is still understood to mean product and service quality and not total quality. However, the word ‘excellence’ does not carry the baggage that quality does. ‘Excellence’ can, and should, be used by all departments in a company. 

The Aditya Birla group, Ashok Leyland, Bosch, SRF and the Mahindra group are all good examples of total quality practice. What’s the difference? The difference is often driven by business needs. In the case of AL, M&M and Bosch, many of their key businesses are strongly customer facing in very competitive markets. In an automobile company, the value chain is long, well integrated and covers distributors, service agents, and others in the market to suppliers, at the other end. Hence, a total quality practice becomes a given, to survive in dynamic and demanding markets. Similarly, in the Aditya Birla group, businesses like telecom, textiles, insurance, and so on, are all quite similar to the long value chains businesses, and demand total quality practice. There are a few more examples, where departments like marketing, sales, finance, etc., also do PDCA projects. Such instances can be found in BPCL, L&T companies, and many Tata companies like Tata Power. Of late, one of the key drivers of the ‘total’ approach is the SDG’s, sustainability, the Triple Bottom Line and environmental degradation. ‘Growth without limits’ is coming for serious criticism, and, companies are addressing these concerns through management excellence. 

The second important point that Mr Muthuraman spoke about was the adoption, or lack thereof, of quality principles by SMEs and MSMEs. This is a more serious issue, as these form the backbone of the organised industry in any economy. For example, in Germany, about 2.5 million SMEs operate in the non-financial sector alone. Similarly, close to 5 million SMEs operate in the UK. In Germany, 99.4% of enterprises are MSMEs, accounting for 63% of employment and 54% value addition. In India, they contribute to over 30% of the GVA, employing over 110 million. And they contribute to close to 50% of India’s exports. It is indeed a matter of concern that many of these units are not able to participate in the TQM and business excellence movements. Some of the reasons are cost, lack of expertise, lack of knowledge, lack of necessary skills and inability to follow the discipline and rigour of the work methods. For example, all these units, if they were to adopt the simple ways of ‘Daily Management’, they would benefit immensely. The quality of their products and processes will improve substantially. The crisis management culture that prevails in some of these MSMEs prevents the adoption of the quality way of working.