TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM) AS A TOOL FOR MANAGING RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONS

Quality management has been used in the industry since the fifties. During the last decade, quality management and quality assurance have been increasingly accepted as a management tool also in the service sector, including R&D. A very pragmatic definition of quality work could be the continuous improvement of although the improvement should conform to a system and be documented (quality assurance) in order to be able to show customers, for example, that the organization is achieving a certain standard in its work, in the way you say you do. A number of different international standards exist, but the most common in Europe is the ISO 9000 series. The following subjects need to be included in the standards: (1) Quality, (2) Quality systems, (3) Quality assurance, and (4) quality management. The main object of setting up a quality system is to satisfy the customers needs and requirements and provide then with the right quality of the deliveries from the organization.