TQM "Total Quality Control" was the key concept of Armand Feigenbaum's 1951 book, Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration, a book that was subsequently released in 1961 under the title, Total Quality Control (ISBN 0-07-020353-9). W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Philip B. Crosby, and Kaoru Ishikawa also contributed to the body of knowledge now known as TQM.

 

The American Society for Quality says that the term Total Quality Management was first used by the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command "to describe its Japanese-style management approach to quality improvement." This is consistent with the story that the United States Navy Personnel Research and Development Center began researching the use of statistical process control (SPC); the work of Juran, Crosby, and Ishikawa; and the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming to make performance improvements in 1984.

 

This approach was first tested at the North Island Naval Aviation Depot. In his paper, "The Making of TQM: History and Margins of the Hi(gh)-Story" from 1994, Xu claims that "Total Quality Control" is translated incorrectly from Japanese since there is no difference between the words "control" and "management" in Japanese.

 

William Golimski refers to Koji Kobayashi, former CEO of NEC, being the first to use TQM, which he did during a speech when he got the Deming Prize in 1974. TQM has nothing to do with Feigenbaum's Total Quality Control or TQC. Total Quality Control means the total control of quality and not the control of total quality. At one point, the Japanese reluctantly used the acronym TQC only because their CWQC (Company-wide Quality Control i.e. Management) was too long and sounded somewhat awkward... CWQC is the ancestor of TQM...

But…………………….

Quality in everyday language, business, engineering and manufacturing has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority, superiority or usefulness of something. This is the most common interpretation of the term. Many different techniques and concepts have evolved to improve product or service quality, including SPC, Zero Defects, Six Sigma, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, quality circles, TQM, Theory of Constraints (TOC),Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000 and others) and continuous improvement.

The meaning for the term quality has developed over time. Various interpretations are given below:
1. ISO 9000 - "Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfills requirements"

2. (Philip B. Crosby in the 1980s)- "Conformance to requirements". The difficulty with this is that the requirements may not fully represent what the customer wants; Crosby treats this as a separate problem.

3. (Joseph M. Juran).- "Fitness for use". Fitness is defined by the customer.

4. (Noriaki Kano and others)- A two-dimensional model of quality. The quality has two dimensions: "must-be quality" and "attractive quality". The former is near to the "fitness for use" and the latter is what the customer would love, but has not yet thought about. Supporters characterize this model more succinctly as: "Products and services that meet or exceed customers' expectations". One writer believes (without citation) that this is today the most used interpretation for the term quality.

5. (Gerald M. Weinberg)- "Value to some person".

6. (W. Edwards Deming)- "Quality and the Required Style of Management" 1988 See http://www.deming.org/. "Costs go down and productivity goes up, as improvement of quality is accomplished by better management of design, engineering, testing and by improvement of processes. Better quality at lower price has a chance to capture a market. Cutting costs without improvement of quality is futile."

7. (Genichi Taguchi). "The loss a product imposes on society after it is shipped". Taguchi's definition of quality is based on a more comprehensive view of the production system.

8. Energy quality, associated with both the energy engineering of industrial systems and the qualitative differences in the trophic levels of an ecosystem.

9. One key distinction to make is there are two common applications of the term Quality as form of activity or function within a business. One is Quality Assurance which is the "prevention of defects", such as the deployment of a Quality Management System and preventative activities like FMEA. The other is Quality Control which is the "detection of defects", most commonly associated with testing which takes place within a Quality Management System typically referred to as Verification and Validation.

Quality can have two meanings:
1. The characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.

2. A product or service free of deficiencies."

The quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service meets the customer's expectations. Quality has no specific meaning unless related to a specific function and/or object. Quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute.

The dimensions of quality refer to the attributes that quality achieves in Operations Management
• Quality supports dependability
• Dependability supports Speed
• Speed supports Flexibility
• Flexibility supports Cost.
Quality, Dependability, Speed, Flexibility, Cost

The most progressive view of quality is that it defined entirely by the customer or end user and is based upon that person's evaluation of his or her entire customer experience. The customer experience is the aggregate of all the touch points that customers have with the company's product and services, and is by definition a combination of these. For example, any time one buys a product one forms an impression based on how it was sold, how it was delivered, how it performed, how well it was supported etc.

 

Contributing Author: Ali R. Hobeheidar

 

The Essence of Survival

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion

or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up.

It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle

or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle:

When the sun comes up, you'd better be running!

 

Steven Bonacorsi

Lean Six Sigma MBB, VP

603-401-7047

http://www.theaitgroup.com

sbonacorsi@comcast.net

Please send me an invite at these other professional networks:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenbonacorsi

http://www.konnects.com/profile/sbonacorsi/