ABSTRACT

                          Over the last few years, a paradigm of quality management has been successfully forged in our business world. Organizations worldwide have been exploring ways to improve business practices to gain competitive edge, which is at hard competition and globalization quality has become the necessity.

Our paper discuss the “hot topic” of Business Excellence (BE) aiming to highlight and clarify the connections with Total Quality Management (TQM). Thus, we describe the quality movement from inspection to statistical quality control and the “Japanese Age” of quality followed then by Total Quality Control (TQC) and TQM developments that derived to the models of BE. After that, we present some perspectives of defining the excellence and an overview of BE models with focus on the referential ones. Finally, it’s an attempt to draft the coordinates of the "journey" through TQM towards its excellence in Business.

Keywords:  Organization; Quality, Excellence; Total Quality Management; Globalization; Business Excellence.