ABSTRACT
When quality is envisaged as the main objective of a whole organization, we are speaking about the concept of quality management. Total Quality Management (TQM) is one of the schools of quality management and is in fact a set of relatively mature methods. The concepts of quality control and quality assurance were created in the 1920s, with statistical quality control presented by the mathematician Walter Shewhart in 1924(Gitlowetal., 1989). The main figure in TQM, W. Edwards Deming, first presented his methods to a Japanese audience in 1950. Armand V. Feigenbaum presented in writing the principles of TQM in his 1951 book Total Quality Control (Feigenbaum, 1961).
