Building Total Quality provides managers with a lucid guide to building, and continuously improving, their company’s quality system. In content, the book is based on a total quality management (TQM) model which is capable of describing the company-market component in relation to the total quality mission. Starting from the model, the book addresses the fundamental issues of building and continuously improving the company quality system and the management of company processes for maximum effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility. A secondary purpose of the book is to provide a tool for company self-assessment in relation to quality. Company self-assessment is an issue that goes to the heart of the continuous improvement process. The interest in self-assessment, dramatically stirred up in the US by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and now in Europe by the European Quality Award demands a better understanding of the assessment criteria and the different approaches to self-assessment. The book represents a systematic treatment of the self-assessment issue and should be a useful reading for total quality assessors.