Competition is one of two important battlefields of today's world of economy (efficiency is the other one) and on this battlefield it is clear that the quality of your all operational and management units as a whole will lead you to success,rather than just product and service quality.

Modern management perspective is making  it of upmost importance. traditional management perspective canot fulfill today's expectations in quality, profitability, efficiency and competition. Traditional perspective mostly bases itself on numeric relationship between profit and cost, all departments within firm focus on this relation and this results in time in competition inbetween departments of the same firm, various interpretation of balance numbers therefore loss in overall firm cooperation. Failing to meet the firm expectations will cause wrong decisions at some point. (for instance setting unrealistic goals and making nonexistent assumptions.) 
On top of that, different aproches are tried in order to conceal production process problems, such as blaming others (managers and employees of other departments) and manipulating numbers.That's why the focus stays on a narrow area and real problems, process and management system related bottlenecks are overlooked. From then on; things are concealed or made up by manupilating numbers. And this deeply undermines competition capability,efficiency capacity,management effectiveness and customer relations of the company.

So, what is total quality management ?

"Total quality management" is an efficient way to improve quality in customer relations, enhance efficiency and preserve competition power. 

Basically, this type of management philosophy focuses on processes producing products and services, management and customer relations as a whole instead of playing with numbers, seeing balance and data as the main purpose and dealing with those and focusing on outputs such as costs and profits.It tries to improve the system that causes the results by making efficient use of numbers instead of altering numeric results and outputs. Numbers are evaluated not to conceal the truth ot alter the output, but to use them efficiently to enhance the process.

We will have a clearer picture of total quality management when we discuss the differences between traditional approaches and total quality management, such as;

• On costs side: Total quality management considers costs as an outcome and interprets cutting costs as just an instrument in executive actions. On the other hand, traditional management focuses direcly on cost-cutting and possibly jeopardize the future of the firm to show better numbers.
   
• On production process and customer relations side: total quality management focuses on processes that show the production process as the main focus is on whether the product or service provided by the company is produced correctly.If the production is made correctly and there is no negligence in quality, the return will be profitable. On the other hand, traditional approach overlooks the quality and functionality of production process as it focuses mainly on profitability-cost relationship, thus resulting in a decrease in customer satisfaction and putting the firm into the position of a " firm that forgets about customer relations just to make some profit". 

• On the interior cooperation side: Company vision that mainly focuses on profit-cost relationship and use numbers as a purpose rather than instrument pushes departments within the firm to build up their own defences and make up their own numbers. This situation causes interior competition within departments and eradicates cooperation.The reason for that is to get needed numbers in any manner. However, total quality management moves the cooperation spirit to the top. Competition is a notion of of the company whereas cooperation is necessary within it. Numbers are not the determinants, but the individuals that appreciate the company as a whole is. Synergy ( the power that comes with commitance) reveals itself strongly in such a philosophy.

• On trust side: Traditional tends to conceal numbers as it focuses on numeric targets as if these numbers are valuable mine. This secrecy has a negative effect on trust within the firm. Total quality management on the hand shares the numbers and information as these things are to share. Employees that have free access to information feel themselves safe, stress is relieved and feels they are embraced and trusted in their firm therefore affiliate more with the company. Natural result of this is trust, cooperation and synergy.