Six Sigma and Total Quality Management: different day, same soup?

Byline: Bengt Klefsjo, Bjarne Bergquist, Rick L. Edgeman For decades now TQM has been a dominant management concept for improving competitiveness and financial results. In recent years, however, TQM seems to have lost some of its nimbus with other concepts and approaches such as Lean Enterprise and Six Sigma launched and increasingly in vogue. The aim of this paper is to look at TQM and Six Sigma, their backgrounds, definitions and ingredients, and their similarities and differences to see whether the two concepts really are different dishes or contain the same ingredients in different proportions.