Quality Management System

The marketing of the concept of "quality" has been emphasized by businesses large and small for over one hundred years now. Since the mature stages of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1900’s, until the present time, quality management has helped manufacturers consistently make products of the same kind, mostly free from dissimilarities or defects. Quality control became the clear and central focus for global capitalism as companies competed to produce the best and most reliable product in order to win the greatest profit and market share. Of course, we all know that the consumers were the ultimate winners in this push for quality, receiving higher quality goods at a cheaper price.

As this discipline of quality improvement grew and evolved into an exact science, it also grew in its scope, covering many other areas besides just manufacturing, such as: government, education, healthcare and the service sector. For our purposes however, let's consider how it has impacted, and still continues to impact the manufacturing process.

Looking back many centuries ago, rudimentary quality control measures were actually in place since the time of the Middle Ages in Europe (around A.D. 400 to 1500). Craftsman guilds (i.e., unions) would make a list of rules and quality standards for their members to follow. This went on for centuries until the modern quality control measures we know today finally took off during the 1920’s, when Walter Shewhart, a worker at Bell Laboratories, did his important work on “controlling processes”. This work specifically was regarding the prevention of time-consuming failures and repairs of underground transmission systems, using the principles of “process quality control”. About fifteen years later, Bell Labs showed up at the outstart of World War II to help the U.S. army reduce it’s inspection load and establish a clear set of quality guidelines for the defense factories. Unfortunately, these important first steps into the world of quality management for U.S. corporations were not to be long-lived and were mostly shelved after the war.

Enter W. Edwards Deming - a U.S. bureaucrat influenced by Shewhart’s work who was sent to Japan after the war to assist the industrial leaders with rebuilding their factories. He found a much more receptive audience in Japan than in the U.S., and the Japanese in the next several years managed to implement his quality control techniques and vastly improve their reputation for quality products. These improvements, which also included a cheaper price tag on the goods, created a fresh demand for Japanese products, especially for well-known giants like Toyota and Sony. This surge in demand for Japanese imports during the 1970’s caused a semi-crisis situation for the U.S. auto and electronics producers. The lost competition between the two industrial giants finally shook up the U.S.’s industrial complacency and led them to adopt the Japanese quality principles formed in the 1950's and '60s which came to be called Total Quality Management (TQM). In one case study, Ford Motors in the early 1980s, after consulting with Dr. Deming, became the new American leader in quality management, helping them to attain greater profitability and a more dominant market share as the decade came to a close.

In the late 20th century, industrial quality management continued to evolve and help companies of every sort to improve their operations. The most influential philosophies now in the 21rst century are: TQM, Six Sigma (owned by Motorola, released in the late 1980’s), Lean Manufacturing (derived from the Japanese, Toyota quality experience) and the Theory of Constraints (TOC, made public by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt in 1984). Each of these philosophies has its own strengths and weaknesses, and individually may or may not fit with a particular management culture. It may be possible in the future to integrate all of them into one package. In the end, they are merely tools of science and tools of art to help both small and large businesses alike to excel in the production and customer service.