Based on the post below, comment expanding on the post or explaining your agreement or disagreement with the information in the post.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is a quality management standard that focuses on the achieving customer satisfaction. It focuses on seven quality management areas: context, leadership, planning, support, operations, evaluation, and improvement (Kloppenborg, Section 12-1c). A strength is that it is a great standard to start with for having a good quality management plan and for achieving customer satisfaction. A weakness of ISO is that it is old and it is a general standard that may not be the best fit for the quality management of all companies.

TQM (Total Quality Management) is a quality organizational style that focuses on customer satisfaction. There are 7 key areas of TQM: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement/analysis/knowledge management, workforce focus, operations focus, and results (Kloppenborg, Section 12-1b). A strength is that it will have an outcome that will fully achieve customer satisfaction. A weakness of TQM is that you have to get customer feedback in order to do this type of quality management.

Lean six sigma uses quantitative measurements and statistical analysis to eliminate as much waste from a process as possible. Eliminating the waste of the process will improve performance. It uses the "DMAIC process to plan and manage improvement projects" (Kloppenborg, Section 12-1d). The steps of DMAIC are define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. A strength is that six sigma will improve work processes as well as achieve customer satisfaction. A weakness of six sigma is that it relies on data in order to improve processes, so it is a hard approach to do if there is no data or if it is hard to get data.

All three approaches have on outcome of quality improvement that leads to customer satisfaction. There are a fair amount of differences between the three approaches.

• ISO has a standard where TQM and six sigma don't.
• TQM focuses on having every department focus on customer satisfaction. Six sigma may just focus on a process instead of every department. ISO may not focus on all functions in the organization like TQM does.
• TQM creates manufactured goods that have great quality. Six sigma causes better results and customer satisfaction.
• TQM uses customer perception to improve the quality of a product. Six sigma uses data to improve the product.
• ISO is a set of standards that helps better the quality management system of a organization. Six sigma has methods that will help improve a process so that the final product quality is better.

At my company we have a continuous improvement that uses the six sigma approach to improve the product quality. I work at a manufacturing company so it is very easy to gather data to analyze so the process can be improved. For example, if there is a system/line that seems to not perform as well as the others, the continuous improvement group will gather data on the processes and try to find what is possibly causing the line to be slower than others.