TQM can be seen as a mixture of:

1. Quality culture — ensuring people understand and act to build quality in, to 'get it right first time' to take responsibility for fixing problems at source rather than passing them on, etc.
2. Quality strategy — a clear direction for quality improvement and sustainability, accompanied by measures and effective policy deployment
3. quality improvement — effectively making use of all the capabilities within the organisation to review and strive for continuous improvement in quality
4. Quality tools — which help support the above activities.