Total Quality Management (TQM)

Traditionally, quality assurance ensures the quality of a product once it's built in order to shield customers from receiving defective product. TQM suggests that rather than putting quality assurance at the end of the product cycle, feedback loops be placed at every step of the product building process so that the actual causes of defects can be identified and fixed. Fixing causes of defects can continually increase customer satisfaction at continually lowers costs.