The main purpose of this paper is to compare and discuss the evolution of six important management systems : Japanese total quality control, total quality management, Deming's system of profound knowledge, business process reengineering, lean thinking and six sigma. Indeed the contribution of this work lies in the concurrent analysis and classification, by the means of a literature review, of the results and critical implementation factors of the six systems. Deming's plan-do-check-act has been used to classify the findings from the literature review.