Quantifying barriers to implementing Total Quality Management (TQM)

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a philosophy that delivers long-term benefits in terms of profitability, customer satisfaction and quality of products. Different organisations work for TQM implementation and utilise their resources to achieve the anticipated benefits. However, it is generally experienced that TQM implementation is a hard and very painful process. There are certain barriers that inhibit the successful implementation of TQM. In the present work, an attempt was made to develop a mathematical model of these barriers using a Graph Theoretic Approach (GTA). An index of barriers in TQM is proposed which evaluates the inhibiting power of these barriers. [Received 02 October 2008; Revised 17 March 2009; Revised 25 May 2009; Accepted 13 June 2009]