4. Conclusion

Just-in-time and TQM are, as we have seen, two closely related management strategies. They cannot be compared.

TQM offers a global vision of everyone's efforts to improve quality and the company's competitive position. On the other hand, it has the following disadvantage: being global, it can tolerate sluggish efforts, and will not necessarily touch certain aspects of production strategy that create inventories and delivery delays.

For its part, just-in-time has at least one drawback: because of its history, it is still perceived by some as a strategy limited to inventories and geared solely to the company's economic ambitions. On the other hand, if just-in-time efforts are carried out with honesty, they will necessarily lead to quality at all levels.

In this article, we have shown that JIT and TQM are ultimately...