The Development of Total Quality Management

By Martin Ade-Onojobi-Bennett
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A brief survey of the development of the concept of Total Quality Management and its importance.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century the quality function has developed from what at best could be described as a cursory inspection of products, into a concept of Total Quality Management (TQM) - a management philosophy in which the needs of the customer are exceeded and which encourages all employees to strive towards continuous improvement in the quality of the products and services of their organisations. The primary objective of the quality function is to ensure that all products are manufactured free from defects, conform to all specifications and satisfy the customers requirement (NCI Quality Management Module 3 Handout, 2005). This function is the main underlying concept behind quality control, quality assurance and TQM and all the main developments, innovations and theories down the decades to the present date have kept this function in focus.

Since the 1920's mathematicians and engineers have used the word sigma as a symbol for a unit of measurement in product quality variation. Six Sigma is an advanced form of TQM. American Motorola engineers first used the expression in the context of quality improvement in 1986 as an informal name for an in-house initiative for reducing defects in production processes. By 2000 it had effectively ensconced its quality and process improvement standards in organisations worldwide.

In the pre-1920 manufacturing period, when an employees work was inspected a decision was made whether to accept or reject it. But in the years that followed and manufacturing became more sophisticated, full time inspection jobs had to be created because more specialized skills, which most production staff did not have, were needed to cope with the more complex and more technical problems that cropped up. Since most inspectors lacked training, a separate inspection department evolved with a chief inspector answerable to the works manager. With this department came new services and issues requiring higher standards of quality control. Thus evolved the quality control department with a quality control manager, responsible for quality control engineering as well as inspection services.

In the 1920s quality control began to benefit from the application of statistical theory and in 1924 Shewhart made the first sketch of a modern control chart. In fact, much of what today comprises the theory of statistical process control (SPC) developed from his early work, though it wasnt till the late 1940s, especially during the rejuvenation of defeated Japans industrial system which had been destroyed in the Second World War, that these techniques were to prove useful in the manufacturing industry.

In 1947 General Douglas McArthur took 200 scientists and specialists, including the renowned American statistician Dr. W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) to Japan to help re-generate its economy and redeem its reputation for shoddy goods. By 1949 the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) was formed and Kaoru Ishikawa (1916-1989) developed and delivered their first basic quality control course that was attended by managers from companies like Sony, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Toyota. 1950 the Union invited Deming to deliver lectures on his statistical quality techniques. Many Japanese

manufacturing companies adopted these and while businesses in the United States were more interested in producing large quantities of products at the expense of quality, the Japanese were gaining a considerable foothold in American markets with their inexpensive and high quality products. In fact, quality management practices developed rapidly in Japanese plants in the early 1950s and become a major theme in Japanese management philosophy.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Japans imports into the USA and Europe continued to significantly and by the late 70s and 80s American businesses were feeling the brunt of Japan's more advanced industrial practices. Some companies, including Ford, IBM, and Xerox, had started to adopt Dr Demings principles of Total Quality Management as a result of which they were able to regain some of the markets earlier lost to the Japanese. However, by this time Japanese firms were able to measure their quality defects in terms of a small number of parts per million, while their Western counterparts were still quoting percentage defects.

The development of the quality function owed a lot to the theories and ideas of three groups of gurus whose contributions to the development of the quality function were groundbreaking. These were

the Americans who went to Japan in the fifties like Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum; the Japanese like Ishikawa, Taguchi and Shingo who developed new concepts in response to the Americans in the late 1950 and Western gurus in the 1970s-1980s like Peters and Crosby.

Deming (1900-1993) promoted problem solving and team work, concepts that were new to statistical quality control. He believed management to be responsible for 94% of quality problems and his famous fourteen point plan included creating a constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service, ceasing the dependence on mass inspection, ending the practice of awarding business on the basis of price and instituting a vigorous programme of education and retraining (1982).

He also promoted the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle, also known as the Deming cycle (see diagram on right), although it was developed by his colleague, Dr Shewhart (1891-1967).

His contemporary Dr Joseph M. Juran developed the quality trilogy quality planning, quality control and quality improvement (1951). According to him, good quality management requires quality actions to be planned out, improved and controlled. His ten steps to quality improvement included building awareness of the need and opportunity for improvement, setting goals for improvement, providing training, carrying out projects to solve problems and maintain momentum (1988).

Another American Armand V. Feigenbaum contributed the concept of Total Quality Control which he defined it as an effective system for integrating quality development, quality maintenance and quality improvement efforts of the various groups within an organisation, so as to enable production and service at the most economical levels that allow full customer satisfaction (1951).

Developments relating to the quality function were also taking place among the Japanese gurus. The renowned Dr Kaoru Ishikawa interpreted total quality as company wide quality control, whereby all staff were encouraged to practice continuous improvement in the quality and productivity of products and

services, so that the needs of the customer were not only catered for, but also surpassed. His innovations include the assembly and use of Pareto analysis (a tool used to separate the vital few from the trivial many - or the 80:20 Rule); Stratification, Check sheets, and Process Control charts -also known as the seven basic tools of quality.

He is also famous for the Ishikawa (or fishbone or cause and effect) diagram (see diagram below). First used in the 1960s it is a graphical method used in a root cause analysis for identifying the most likely causes for an undesired effect. The main bones of the diagram can be labelled with categories such as the 4 Ms: management, manpower, machines and materials (the 4 M's), the 4 Ps: Place, Procedure, People, Policies and the 4 Ss: Surroundings, Suppliers, Systems, Skills, with identified problems stemming from each.

Wikipedia 2005

His contemporary Dr Genichi Taguchi introduced the Taguchi methodology which enabled designers to identify the best possible settings to produce a sturdy product that could survive manufacturing and provide what the customer wants. Another Japanese expert Shigeo Shingo is strongly associated with the Poka-Yoke (mistake proofing) system which examined defects and the production system was either stopped so that the root causes of the problem could be established and prevented from reoccurring, or the error condition was automatically adjusted to prevent it from becoming a defect. The aim of PokaYoke was to stop errors becoming defects. He also identified Zero quality control as the ideal production system.

The American Tom Peters identified leadership as being central to the quality improvement process and suggested Managing By Walking About (MBWA), innovation and people as the three main areas in the pursuit of excellence (1982). His contemporary, Philip Crosby helped to popularise the use of TQM and introduced the "4 Absolutes of Quality" which identified quality as conformance to requirements, achieved through prevention rather than appraisal. He championed "zero defects" as the quality performance standard and believed that by setting up processes that are designed to prevent errors, not only will quality improve, but production cost will also be reduced.

Peters fourteen steps to quality improvement include giving formal recognition to all participants, forming a management level quality improvement team (QIT), evaluating the cost of quality and encouraging employees to communicate to management any problems they identify.

In 1983 the National Quality using BS5750 was introduced and since then the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO)9000 a globally recognised standard for quality management systems and Sigma Six (introduced by Motorola in 1986) - a quality improvement methodology for achieving near perfect quality (UK DTI, 2005), have become the internationally recognised standards for the implementation of the quality function in the twenty-first century.

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