BALDRIGE

Malcolm Baldrige* is not generally considered to be one of the quality management 'gurus' (he was the US Secretary of Commerce from 1981 to 1987) but the creation of the award named for him was one of the landmark events in rekindling interest in quality management in North America. The Baldrige award criteria is an important tool that defines the elements of an effective, customer-focused management system based upon quality principles. It is widely used for educational and assessment purposes.

SHEWHART
Dr. Walter A. Shewhart is considered the father of Statistical Process Control (SPC). Shewhart worked in Bell Laboratories and was engaged in a search for practical methods of quality control for the emerging telephone industry, which required mass production on a huge scale. His ideas, published in the 1930's, formed the basis for a system/process oriented approach to quality control, by viewing any repetitive activity as a process and using statistics to understand and to manage the variations that will always oc

DR. H. JAMES HARRINGTON

An author and consultant in the area of process improvement, Harrington spent forty years with IBM. His career included serving as Senior Engineer and Project Manager of Quality Assurance for IBM, San Jose, California. He was President of Harrington, Hurd and Reicker, a well-known performance improvement consulting firm until Ernst & Young bought the organization. He is the international quality advisor for Ernst and Young and on the board of directors of various national and international companies. Harrington served as president and chairman of the American Society for Quality and the International Academy for Quality. In addition, he has been elected as an honorary member of six quality associations outside of North America and was selected for the Singapore Hall of Fame. His books include The Improvement Process, Business Process Improvement, Total Improvement Management, ISO 9000 and Beyond, Area Activity Analysis, The Creativity Toolkit, Statistical Analysis Simplified, The Quality/Profit Connection, and High Performance Benchmarking.

FREDERICK TAYLOR (1856915)

An industrial (efficiency) engineer, manager, and consultant, Frederick Taylor is known as the Father of Scientific Management. In 1911, he published The Principles of Scientific Management.Taylor believed in task specialization and is noted for his time and motion studies. Some of his ideas are the predecessors for modern industrial engineering tools and concepts that are used in cycle time reduction. While quality experts would agree that Taylor's concepts increase productivity, some argue that his concepts are focused on productivity, not process improvement and as a result could cause less emphasis on quality. Dr. Joseph Juran said that Taylor's concepts made the United States the world leader in productivity. However, the Taylor system required separation of planning work from

executing the work. This separation was based on the idea that engineers should do the planning because supervisors and workers were not educated. Today, the emphasis is on transferring planning to the people doing the work.

DR. GENICHI TAGUCHI (B. 1924)

Dr. Genichi Taguchi was a Japanese engineer and statistician who defined what product specification means and how this can be translated into cost effective production. He worked in the Japanese Ministry of Public Health and Welfare, Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Ministry of Education. He also worked with the Electrical Communications Laboratory of the Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Co. to increase the productivity of the R&D activities. In the mid 1950s Taguchi was Indian Statistical Institute visiting professor, where he met Walter Shewhart. He was a Visiting Research Associate at Princeton University in 1962, the same year he received his Ph.D. from Kyushu University. He was a Professor at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University and Director of the Japanese Academy of Quality. Taguchi was awarded the Deming Application prize (1960), Deming awards for literature on quality (1951, 1953, and 1984), Willard F. Rockwell Medal by the International Technologies Institute (1986). Taguchi's contributions are in robust design in the area of product development. The Taguchi Loss Function, The Taguchi Method (Design of Experiments), and other methodologies have made major contributions in the reduction of variation and greatly improved engineering quality and productivity. By consciously considering the noise factors (environmental variation during the product's usage, manufacturing variation, and component deterioration) and the cost of failure in the field, Taguchi methodologies help ensure customer satisfaction. Robust Design focuses on improving the fundamental function of the product or process, thus facilitating flexible designs and concurrent engineering. Taguchi product development includes three stages: (1) system design (the non-statistical stage for engineering, marketing, customer and other knowledge); (2) parameter stage (determining how the product should perform against defined parameters; and (3) tolerance design (finding the balance between manufacturing cost and loss).

Armand V Feigenbaum is the originator of Total Quality Control. He sees quality control as a business method rather than technically, and believes that quality has become the single most important force leading to organisational success and growth. Dr Armand V Feigenbaum is the originator of Total Quality Control. The first edition of his book Total Quality Control was completed whilst he was still a doctoral student at MIT. In his book Quality Control: Principles, Practices and Administration, Feigenbaum strove to move away from the then primary concern with technical methods of quality control, to quality control as a business method. Thus he emphasised the administrative viewpoint and considered human relations as a basic issue in quality control activities. Individual methods, such as statistics or preventive maintenance, are seen as only segments of a comprehensive quality control programme.

Quality control itself is defined as: 'An effective system for co-ordinating the quality maintenance and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organisation so as to enable production at the most economical levels which allow for full customer satisfaction.' He stresses that quality does not mean best but best for the customer use and selling price. The word control in quality control represents a management tool with 4 steps:

Setting quality standards

Appraising conformance to these standards

Acting when standards are exceeded

Planning for improvements in the standards.

Quality control is seen as entering into all phases of the industrial production process, from customer specification and sale through design, engineering and assembly, and ending with shipment of product to a customer who is happy with it. Effective control over the factors affecting product quality is regarded as requiring controls at all important stages of the production process. These controls or jobs of quality control can be classified as:

New-design control

Incoming material control

Product control

Special process studies.

Quality is seen as having become the single most important force leading to organisational success and company growth in national and international markets. Further, it is argued that: Quality is in its essence a way of managing the organisation and that, like finance and marketing, quality has now become an essential element of modern management. Thus a Total Quality System is defined as: The agreed company-wide and plantwide operating work structure, documented in effective, integrated technical and managerial procedures, for guiding the co-ordinated actions of the people, the machines and the information of the company and plant in the best and most practical ways to assure customer quality satisfaction and economical costs of quality. Operating quality costs are divided into:

Prevention costs including quality planning.

Appraisal costs including inspection.

Internal failure costs including scrap and rework.

External failure costs including warranty costs, complaints etc.

Reductions in operating quality costs result from setting up a total quality system for two reasons:

Lack of existing effective customer-orientated customer standards may mean current quality of products is not optimal given use Expenditure on prevention costs can lead to a severalfold reduction in internal and external failure costs.

The new 40th Anniversary edition of Dr A V Feigenbaum's book, Total Quality Control, now further defines TQC for the 1990s in the form of ten crucial benchmarks for total quality success. These are that:

Quality is a company-wide process.

Quality is what the customer says it is.

Quality and cost are a sum, not a difference.

Quality requires both individual and team zealotry.

Quality is a way of managing.

Quality and innovation are mutually dependent.

Quality is an ethic.

Quality requires continuous improvement.

Quality is the most cost-effective, least capital-intensive route to productivity.

Quality is implemented with a total system connected with customers and suppliers.

These are the ten benchmarks for total quality in the 1990s. They make quality a way of totally focusing the company on the customer - whether it be the end user or the man or woman at the next work station or next desk. Most importantly, they provide the company with foundation points for successful implementation of its international quality leadership.