Continuous improvement
Continuous Improvement: What is it?
Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes. These efforts can seek “incremental” improvement over time or breakthrough improvement at all at once.
Continuous improvement is also defined that an approach to quality management that build upon traditional quality assurance methods by emphasizing the organization and systems.

THE CONCEPT OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT BY TQM

Continuous improvement must deal not only with improving results, but more importantly with improving capabilities to produce better results in the future. The five major areas of focus for capability improvement are demand generation, supply generation, technology, operations and people capability.
A central principle of TQM is that mistakes may be made by people, but most of them are caused, or at least permitted, by faulty systems and processes. This means that the root cause of such mistakes can be identified and eliminated, and repetition can be prevented by changing the process.
There are three major mechanisms of prevention: 1. Preventing mistakes (defects) from occurring (Mistake - proofing or Poka-Yoke). 2. Where mistakes can't be absolutely prevented, detecting them early to prevent them being passed down the value added chain (Inspection at source or by the next operation). 3. Where mistakes recur, stopping production until the process can be corrected, to prevent the production of more defects. (Stop in time).
The basis for TQM implementation is the establishment of a quality management system which involves the organizational structure, responsibilities, procedures and processes. The most frequently used guidelines for quality management systems are the ISO 9000 international standards, which emphasize the establishment of a well- documented, standardized quality system. The role of the ISO 9000 standards within the TQM circle of continuous improvement is presented in the following figure.
The importance of of ynderstanding customer expectation Customer expectations are a key ingredient to the success or failure of a business or organization. To begin it is important to identify who is a customer. A customer is an individual or organization who buys a product or service in the typical sense from a company or organization. In the non-traditional sense a customer in