1.

1 Development of Quality Thinking

Figure 2.1 indicates the new ideas which arrived in quality at various point in history. The advent of a new era does not
necessarily mean that the practices and principles espoused by earlier eras died out; in fact many examples of
craftsmanship or quality assurance can be found today. Nor is the beginning of each era meant to represent the first
articulation of theories or approaches, but where they became mainstream. The bands indicate, broadly, times when
those ideas were pre-eminent in the quality domain.

Figure 2.1. A Quality Timeline

2.3.1 The Craftsmanship Era (Up to 1900)

Before the Industrial Revolution it was usual that people who made things also sold them directly to their customers who
were generally from the same vicinity. Services also were less sophisticated and the person providing the service dealt
directly with the customer. If a craftsman were particularly good at his work, he would sometimes attract custom from
other localities through word of mouth advertising. Quality - meeting the needs of the customer - was very personal in
those days and because of a lack of far-reaching distribution systems, it was particularly important to achieve and retain
a local reputation for good work at a fair price. The development of Guilds of craftsman developed this thinking further
with established ‘masters’ assessing candidates for membership.

2.3.2 Standardisation, Mass Production and Quality Assurance (1900 - 1930)

With the formation of factories and increasing automation, work became progressively de-skilled and more repetitive. The
supplier/end-user relationship was lost and with it the pride in workmanship associated with the skilled craftsman. This
became a self-sustaining cycle; the less factory jobs required the skills of traditional craftsmen, the more they attracted
unskilled people. In America in the early 20th century the concentration of semi and unskilled workers in the factories
was compounded by the diversity of the spoken language of immigrant workers. The solution to communication problems
and only paying piecework rates for good product was to employ inspectors who could differentiate between conforming
and non-conforming items. Figure 2.1 shows the general situation in which inspectors check the output of an operation
and decide whether the product is good, consigned to scrap or returned to the manufacturing operation for rework
Quality Management Background and History

Rework

Input Customer
Process I
Quality Management Background and History

Scrap

Figure 2.2. The introduction of inspection to the business process.

The effect of the introduction of inspection was to prove dramatic. This system tells the individual worker that if they are
not sure whether or not their work is conforming, it does not really matter because the inspectors’ job is to make that
decision. Thus, responsibility for the quality of work is removed from the individual and placed with the Quality
Department that employs the inspectors. The worker is being paid for the amount of product produced and, therefore, the
primary aim of the production process is to manufacture the volume of product required by management. The inspector
becomes the barrier between the production operation and the customer - the part of the operation that ensures that the
customer receives a quality product. The last vestiges of worker self-respect are removed when management discuss
production problems with supervisors and inspectors, but not the workers who are part of the process under discussion.

It was the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 1900s that legitimised the use of inspectors to ensure adequate
quality of finished product. He was to become known as the father of the so-called Scientific Management; his emphasis
was on work output, labour efficiency and the introduction of work-study. With the accent purely on output, labour
efficiency and the introduction of Work Study and Work Measurement, quality was treated as an afterthought. In his book,
Taylor describes the answer to poor quality of output as the rigorous application of more and more inspectors, who in
themselves were now seen as specialists. He was hugely successful at what he did and, it could be argued that he met the
needs of his time. This is, of course, not to suggest that ‘Quality Assurance’ has died out. The Make-Test-Deliver process
is still with us and is, arguably, the dominant approach to delivering quality products in the world.

2.3.3 Quality Control Era (1930 - 1950)

A number of thinkers began to see that Scientific Management and associated approaches de-humanised the work place;
workers were not paid to think, but to carry out to the letter the work instructions of supervision and management. After
a while the workers gave up any attempt to correct things that were wrong in the production operation and began to
disassociate themselves from the success of the organisation. Apart from the human aspects of the inspection-based
organisation, routine 100% inspection quite simply does not work. It is inevitable that an inspection process will lead to
products that should have been scrapped or returned for rework being despatched to the customer, and good products will
be scrapped or returned for rework. Each of the adverse outcomes of inspection is serious; customers quite rightly do not
like to receive sub-standard products and if sufficiently upset will take their business elsewhere. Rework lines receiving
good or scrap product believe that the hapless inspectors deserve the poor reputation that they have on the shop floor. The
I was
key issue is that inspection is an activity that takes place after a defective product is made. At best the defective product
is not despatched to the customer. However, quality cannot be inspected into a product - quality has to be built into
each process.

By as early as the 1920s, Walter A Shewhart, an American statistician who worked for the Bell Telephone Company,
became involved in the manufacture of millions of telephone relays, and he realised that inspection after the event was
not a good way of ensuring quality. He studied how the manufacturing process could be monitored in such a way as
to prevent non-conforming items being produced and in 1924 he invented the control chart. In 1931 he published the
world’s first book on quality control “Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product” (Shewhart, 1980) and his
work forms the basis of all teaching on Statistical Process Control today.
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Quality Management Background and History

Dr William Edwards Deming had been a student of Walter Shewhart and he spent his early years as a Government employee,
mainly in the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Census. Following the Second World War the US Government
played a significant role in rebuilding Japanese industry, and Deming was invited to apply his statistical knowledge to the
Japanese situation. He taught them to apply the statistical method and team approach to quality improvement that has
transformed Japan into market leaders of virtually every form of manufactured goods. He has been referred to as the father
of the Third Industrial Revolution.

The principal focus of the quality control era was to replace inspection with more informative process control systems
which aimed to reduce variation in outputs (be they product or service) and deliver more consistency by focusing on
inputs. Its modern day incarnation is Six Sigma.

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Quality Management Background and History

2.3.4 The Total Quality Management (TQM) Era (1950 - 1970)

In addition to his work with SPC, Deming was strongly convinced of the need to build the human element into quality. His
14 points are an attempt to define the transformation of Western style of management to accomplish the necessary change.

Also in the early 1950s, Dr Joseph M Juran participated in the quality movement in Japan and, like Deming, has been
bestowed with Imperial honours in recognition of his contribution to Japan’s industrial success. Juran believed in the
management of Quality and thus concentrated his efforts on executive and senior management who he believed to be
responsible for the majority of quality problems. In 1951 he published the first edition of The Quality Control Handbook;
it is now in its 6th edition (Defoe and Juran, 2010) and it still is regarded as the practitioners Quality Bible, being full of
management and planning techniques as well as the technical aspects of quality.

Another well respected American quality specialist, Dr Armand V Feigenbaum, first published in 1961 a book entitled
Total Quality Control which was the first to express the view that quality was not just about manufacturing, but could be
applied to departments such as Engineering, Development, Sales and Service. “Quality is from the cradle to the grave,
from the womb to the tomb!” He also developed the technique of measuring the cost of quality, showing that by adopting
preventive techniques an improvement in Quality Costs can be achieved.

More recently, and also from America, came to prominence Philip Crosby, ex Vice President for Quality with ITT who
founded a Quality College in Florida and later one in Europe. He is thought to be the world’s leading consultant on quality
improvement; his view is that quality is free and he promotes the concept of “Right first Time” as a way to change the
management culture of an organisation. His four Absolutes of Quality Management are seen as a good starting point for
any company embarking on quality improvement action.

The enduring strength of the humanist approach to quality sees it now enshrined in most companies’ vision and mission
statements (“people are our most important asset”), and much that was originally heretical- involvement, empowerment,
trust and respect are now seen as the norm; in theory if not always in practice.

2.3.5 Standards and Awards (1970 - 1990)

The strength of TQM was in the principles it laid down for how to transform an organization. Its weakness was the need
for interpretation and the wide range of approaches from the good to the bad, and even the ugly which it spawned. The
variability of results seen by customers attested to this.

Over the years a need for standardisation was felt; to homogenise not the approach, but at least the principles. BS5750
and ISO 9000 Quality Systems Standards have been the most successful elements of this approach. They are externally
audited and accredited standards which have been joined in more recent years by Quality or Excellence Awards which
are recognitions of company approaches and performance relying more on self-assessment.

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Quality Management Background and History

2.3.6 Initiatives (1990 - present)

The final trend has been the appearance of mega-initiatives, of which Lean and Six Sigma are probably the
most prevalent. These have both been around since before the 1990s but have come to prominence from
that period due to aggressive marketing from consultancies. The merits of these systems will be discussed
later, but the susceptibility of senior management teams in a wide variety of sectors and sizes of
organizations to hard selling of ‘silver-bullet’ approaches is, perhaps the most worrying trend of all.

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