Zata Blog

TQM - Total Quality Management was a concept touted by Management Guru’s in the early 90’s as a way of ensuring that every part of the organization is striving for excellence.

I was fortunate enough to be part of a TQM implementation while in the restaurant industry in 1994. I say fortunate, because there were a few key points that changed how I viewed business.

Observation 1: Measure only things that matter - and a lot matters

We used the TQM framework to establish operation excellence measures in every part of the business including:

Building exterior
Buliding interior - customer facing space
Service standards - human interaction (was the customer greeted promply)
Service standards - analytics (speed of service measures)
Production areas
Production processes
Storage areas
Waste and Maintenance

As you can see, essentially we started in the parking lot and walked through the restaurant all the way out the back door.

At every point, we looked at broad items such as, “Are the windows clean?” to more detailed questions such as “Are the corners of the front entrance dust and dirt free?”.

By contrasting the broad and the detailed, we created an awareness that it was the little things that made the difference for our guests.

Observation 2: It will never be perfect

The danger is that by adopting such a rigorous methodology that you never get down to the business of running the business. You’re too busy running around with a clipboard making sure that all of the lights are working.

We avoided that by simply accepting that we were never going to measure up.

We resolved that we were going to run at 90% of our operation excellence measure, 100% of the time.

That meant, in practical terms, that we would be great, but not perfect, ALL OF THE TIME.

It made the staff pay attention to details but not get so caught up with them that we sacrificed the profitability of the business.

Observation 3: Consistent application of standards is the key

Once every 2 months a team from another location would come in and measure us. The date and time was random, and we didn’t get advance warning.

The result was a daily walk-through that was standardized so that even a junior staff member could do it. Using pre-printed checklists, they checked 20 of the 200 or so data points that the team would look at. Any more than 2 failures and we would do another test.

Since then, the concept of TQM still resonates. It might be called something different, depending on who’s writing about it, but the concept remains. Measure. Improve. Measure again.

- Brad Brooks