WORLD-CLASS MANUFACTURING, PRODUCTIVITY AND TOTAL QUALITY

Among the actions undertaken by firms in an effort to achieve and maintain competitiveness, three have been particularly emphasized at one time or another. These are world class-manufacturing, total quality management, and productivity improvement. Far from being mutually exclusive, these approaches are interrelated, overlap, and complement each other. In this paper, we propose to outline the interrelationships between these three approaches. By so doing, we try to demonstrate how TQM can be viewed as a management approach which operationalizes a new paradigm in management. The new paradigm has surpassed mass production as the most attractive management philosophy in most dynamic, global industrial sectors.