The Gurus of Quality under Total Quality Management

The Gurus of Quality under Total Quality Management!

i. W. Edwards Deming is perhaps the best known of the early pioneers who popularized quality control in Japan in the early 1950s. His 14 principles of quality improvement have been already discussed in the earlier pages. He has played a substantial role in increasing the visibility of the process and advancing an awareness of the need to improve quality.

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ii. Joseph M. Juran:

Juran defines quality as fitness for use in terms of design, conformance, availability, safety and field use. His concept of quality is consistent with the point of view of the customer. He proposed that quality should be viewed as an investment in a firm’s profitability. White Deming emphasized worker involvement and worker pride, Juran focused on top-down management approach. His ten steps to quality improvement are:

1. Build awareness of opportunities to improve.

2. Set goals for improvement.

3. Organize to reach goals.

4. Provide training.

5. Carry out projects to solve problems.

6. Report progress.

7. Give recognition.

8. Communicate results.

9. Keep score.

10. Maintain momentum by making annual improvement part of the regular systems and processes of the company.

Juran believed that almost 80 percent of the quality problems can be attributed to management and can be corrected only by improving the management control system.

iii. Armand Feigenbaum:

Feigenbaum, manager of quality control for General Electric headquarters in the 1950s, advocated total quality control and he defined it as:

“An effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production and service at the most economical levels which allow for full customer satisfaction.”

He believed that the quality control was too important an issue to be simply left to quality control inspectors which would be inspecting for quality after the fact rather than building it in at an earlier stage of the process.

iv. Philip B. Crosby:

Philip Crosby, in his book “Quality is Free” argued that poor quality in the average firm costs about 20 percent of revenues, most of which could be avoided. His “absolutes” of quality are:

i. Quality is defined as conformance to requirements, and not simply as “goodness.”

ii. The system for achieving quality is prevention, not appraisal.

iii. The performance standard is zero defects and not “closes enough”.

iv. The measurement of quality is the price of non-conformance, not any indexes.

Crosby states that quality is free because the small costs of prevention will always be lower than the costs of detection. Everyone needs to be trained by quality experts in quality control, quality assurance and quality management.

His approach to quality improvement is to get everyone to “do it right the first time”.

All of these pioneers believe that management and the system, rather than workers are the cause of poor quality. The common themes of these pioneers can be summarized as follows:

1. Inspection is never the answer to quality improvement, nor is “policing”.

2. Involvement of and leadership by top management are essential to the necessary culture of commitment to quality.

3. A programme for quality requires organization-wide efforts and long- term commitment, accompanied by the necessary investment in training.

4. Quality is first and schedules are secondary.