Posted by kevin kreitman on October 15, 2003 at 17:46:48:

In Reply to: Re: KM and TQM posted by Kian Nam on October 14, 2003 at 13:30:21:

TQM was about understanding and discovering better processes, first on the assembly line, later in the design of products for manufacture, and finally in the end-to-end optimization of the entire process, from marketing to ordering to producing and delivering. This improvement process depended on collecting data, and information and analyzing it, and on sharing and codifying knowledge and discoveries. Improving design processes, optimizing design-for-manufacture, and optimizing end-to-end processes depended on having the people who had knowledge about individual parts of the process work together in teams, and share their knowledge so that the best decisions could be made. Most companies who successfully practiced TQM began to gather and share these stories and practices across their organizations, to make the organizations more effective. I think this was the beginning of "knowledge management."
Knowledge management was "invented" or identified when people recognized what they were doing, and tried to expand it and extend it to companies that were doing BPR and other radical reinvention (redesigning the way companies operated, using new information technologies). Again, this was a process of understanding what works, and being able to capture it as "knowledge"--applying best practices, along with the understanding of why and when the best practices work.
This might at least give you a beginning as to how TQM and KM are related--at least IMHO.

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