A Chronology of Quality, Part 1

The birth of the quality movement

 Matthew Barsalou

Joseph Juran’s A History of Managing for Quality (ASQ Quality Press, 1995) traced the history of quality management back to the time when the pyramids were built in Egypt. However, until the advent of the industrial revolution, when mass production also appeared, quality management involved little more than craftsmen checking their own work.

The need for quality in the production of parts increased when the U.S. system of manufacturing required parts to be produced exactly alike. According to David Hounshell in From the American System to Mass Production 1800–1932 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), mass production’s origins can be traced to the French General Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval, who attempted to standardize parts in the French arms industry in 1765. The U.S. War Department was heavily influenced by the French around this time, and started experimenting with interchangeable parts at federal armories. This work was further encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, who was a strong supporter of interchangeable parts in weapons manufacturing. In addition to interchangeable parts, the U.S. government encouraged mechanization at federal arsenals. This system was known as the American system of manufacturing.

The rise of statistical methods in quality

After the arrival of mass production, product quality was dependent on inspectors. There were breakthroughs in quality control at the Western Electric Co.’s Hawthorne plant, a division of AT&T. The plant itself was made famous in industrial psychology because of the Hawthorne Experiments, which determined that employees work better when they feel that management has taken an interest in them. Less well known is what was happening in the plant’s inspection department during the mid-1920s. This was the time when Juran joined the Hawthorne plant’s inspection department.

Juran worked at the department around the time when it was attempting to scientifically determine optimal sampling plans. There were many weaknesses in the Hawthorne plant’s reliance on inspection. Here are a few examples:• Waste was created from producing defective products.• Production workers did not have a say in controlling their own work.• Inspection gauges sorted good product from bad without providing feedback about the process.• Sampling tolerated only a specific percentage of defective parts.• Inspectors were not capable of detecting 100 percent of the defective parts.

Another problem with inspection was that even if defective parts were prevented from reaching the customer, the customer would still pay for the defects because of the higher cost of producing the parts if many were defective. The cost of inspection itself would also be a factor that could drive up the cost of finished products. Overall, relying on inspection represented an acceptance of waste that generated higher costs for the consumer.

For example, when Juran started at the Hawthorne plant, 5,200 workers out of 40,000 were employed in the inspection department. Most of these workers inspected and tested the product. Other workers calibrated the various gauges and meters used by the inspection department. The products Hawthorne shipped were high quality; however, the costs were proportionately high because of all the people involved in inspecting and reworking the products.

Harold F. Dodge started as a development engineer at Western Electric Co. in 1917. He explains that during the early 1920s, industry was attempting to work scientifically using Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of scientific management and tools such as Gant charts. At this time industry was trying to strike a balance between costs and schedules, and quality entered the equation as a new factor that needed to be added in. The new management methods became known as “quality control.” Many techniques, such as sampling plans and statistical process control, were soon being referred to as “statistical quality control.”

In 1924 Bell Labs, owned by Western Electric Co., used 100-percent testing and inspection to determine if products were in conformance with requirements, and many products were reworked so they would function correctly. The risk of having material rejected influenced producers to improve their quality. As a result, inspections were decreased as the amount of sampling increased, inspectors received better training, and measurement accuracy was improved.

Walter Shewhart was one of the engineers at Bell Labs, and he created the control chart on May 16, 1924. Used for statistical process control, the chart could determine if a process was stable and produced parts that were within specification limits. The control chart used mathematical formulas to determine an upper and lower control limit. If a part was outside of these limits, then there was reason to think that there were parts out of specification, and all parts needed individual checking. An unstable process was also a signal for the operator to check the machine that produced the parts.

According to Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford Mason in Quality or Else (Mariner Books, 1993), many people consider the quality movement to have started that day when Shewhart gave management his memo about control charts.

Shewhart’s control charts took many years to be implemented at the Hawthorne plant. Juran reports that he tried to encourage managers to use the charts but seldom succeeded. He could not understand managers’ reluctance, but he later understood that managers’ priority was to ship products. Also, workers got bonuses based on a piece-rate system, another incentive to ship as much product as possible.

In 1925 Bell Lab’s inspection engineering department and Hawthorne’s inspection branch formed the Joint Committee on Inspection Statistics and Economy. Two of the committee members were Walter Shewhart and Harold F. Dodge. The Hawthorne plant started a new department called the Inspection Statistical Department, and Juran was one of the engineers there. Statistical sampling plans were made based on production lots, and each lot was permitted to have a specific percentage classified as defective. A single random sample was used to determine if the lot should be accepted or rejected.

The team that Dodge worked with at Bell Labs originated the concept of average outgoing quality level, and along with Bell Labs statistician H. G. Romig, Dodge developed other sampling plans. Dodge also helped to develop the U.S. Army’s post-World War II-era sampling

plan, Military Standards 105A–105D, which the U.S. Department of Defense discontinued in 1995. Dodge and Romig report that their sampling tables were published in January 1941 in The Bell Telephone System Technical Journal and then reprinted in 1944 as Sampling Inspection Tables: Single and Double Sampling. The sampling tables are known as the “Dodge and Romig Sampling Tables.”

In 1926 Juran realized that there would be no defective parts in the lots if the production process was perfect, and there would also be no defective parts in the lot if the process was very bad because defects would be found during random sampling, and the entire lot would be 100-percent inspected. However, if the process was somewhere between the two extremes, there would be some defective parts in the lot. Juran called this “the average outgoing quality level.” He thought he had discovered the concept but later learned that Dodge had thought of it first. The Hawthorne plant’s sampling plans were eventually issued in a U.S. government standard called MIL-STD105A.

In 1931 Shewhart published Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (American Society for Quality reprint, 1980), which was edited by W. Edwards Deming, who worked at the Hawthorne plant, but only as a student worker during summer months. Shewhart started lecturing on the use of statistics within the field of quality. In 1935 in England, Egon Pearson also started lecturing on the subject. Shewhart’s 1938 lectures at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Graduate School became the basis for his 1939 book, Statistical Method From the Viewpoint of Quality Control (Dover Publications reprint, 1986).

Quality and World War II

Before the start of World War II, Shewhart advised L.N. Simon of the Pentagon’s Ordnance Department to use statistical methods. The department used these methods at the Picatinny Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Ground, and found them to be useful. The Ordnance Department decided it must either train all suppliers in statistical process control, or it must implement acceptance sampling. It chose acceptance sampling because of the large amount of material that was needed in a short period of time. The Dodge-Romig sampling tables were ideal for reducing inspection costs in industry; however, the Ordnance Department needed something simple, so Dodge and others from Bell Labs developed an acceptable quality level table. The acceptable quality level was defined as “the maximum value percent defective that the consumer would consider satisfactory as a process average for purposes of the acceptance sampling to be performed by the consumer.” The producer’s parts would be accepted most of the time if they met the acceptable quality level, and more detailed inspections would be performed if the parts failed to meet it.

During the early 1940s, Deming recommended that Stanford University’s statistics department teach statistical process control, and Stanford professor Eugene L. Grant prepared a 10-day class that was later trimmed to eight days. Deming was the lead instructor, and Grant handled administrative details as well as teaching. Grant also organized a quality society in California in 1943, and this society eventually became a part of the American Society for Quality Control in 1946.

Grant went to Washington to persuade the War Production Board to organize training in statistical quality control. He was met with opposition. One person even told Grant that he could send people to the training, but people in war industries were too busy for such pointless

activities. Eventually, the War Production Board agreed to implement the training, and Grant was placed in charge.

Juran in Architect of Quality (McGraw-Hill, 2003) explains that the War Production Board assigned university statistics professors the task of training government contractors in the use of Shewhart’s control chart. The main effect of these classes was the rise of quality engineers and quality managers within factories, as well as the start of quality departments within many manufacturing companies. There were other breakthroughs in quality during World War II, but most were related to inspection and sampling techniques. At the time, the emphasis was on technical solutions to quality problems, and there was little worker involvement. The main objective was often to meet delivery schedules, and quality came second to that goal.

Some progress was made in using statistics during World War II. A U.S. government report on industrial research mentioned how useful statistics were in purchasing munitions. The report notes that the days when engineers considered mathematicians to be strange and incompetent had ended. The report also referred to Shewhart’s Statistical Methods from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (Dover Publications, 1986) and quoted Juran, who explained that inspection both removes defective parts and alerts the manufacturer to the existence of a problem. A 1947 report from the National Academy of Sciences explained that before World War II, statistical methods were not well known in industry outside of Bell Telephone; however, many companies quickly started using statistics for accepting or rejecting deliveries based on statistical sampling.

The report was intended to be distributed to organizations that could teach statistics. According to the report, the Office of Production Research and Development of the War Production Board started teaching statistical process control for production people and engineers in 1943. About 2,000 people from more than 800 companies attended the training classes. Shewhart was the chairman of the subcommittee on statistical quality control.

In his A History of Managing for Quality (Irwin Professional Publishing, 1995), Juran explains that many companies stopped using statistical process control after World War II because companies did not think it was economical. There was also a shortage of consumer goods at the end of the war, and meeting delivery schedules took priority over quality. Some of the new quality engineers participated in quality planning, wrote quality reports, wrote procedure manuals, and performed quality audits. Some companies created quality control departments run by managers who had been in charge of the former inspection departments. Around this time quality departments began to be placed under management in organizational diagrams. Quality professionals started to focus on the reliability of a product during its lifetime, and the job of reliability engineer was created.

During World War II, Deming was one of the statistics instructors for the Office of Production Research and Development of the War Production Board. He was also a U.S. census employee. Andrea Gabor would eventually write a book about Deming titled The Man Who Discovered Quality (Penguin Books, 1992).

A Chronology of Quality, Part 2

Quality in a seller’s market

 Matthew Barsalou

Published: 02/19/2013

After the end of World War II, U.S. industry had become a seller’s market, and the priority for manufacturers was quantity over quality. According to Andrea Gabor’s book, The Man Who Discovered Quality(Penguin Books, 1992), many companies discontinued the use of statistical process control, and even AT&T abandoned Shewhart’s control chart during the 1950s.

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Business schools at this time also taught that increased quality was the equivalent of increased costs, and this theory together with a seller’s market lowered the quality standard in U.S. industry.

In 1946 Preston Wescot, who had been one of the War Production Board statistical quality control instructors, got together with George Deforest Edwards, Bell Labs’ director of quality assurance, and eight other men to form the American Society for Quality Control (ASQC). The new society was a merging of 17 different quality societies and originally had 253 founding members. To raise funds, the society allowed new members to pay an additional fee in order to be considered founding members. By the end of 1946, there were more than 1,000 members. The society held its first annual convention in June 1947, at which time Walter A. Shewhart, a founding member, was voted an honorary member, and the society’s Shewhart Medal was created. The Buffalo Society of Quality Engineers donated the journalIndustrial Quality Control to the ASQC, and the publication eventually became Quality Progress magazine. ASQC dropped the word “Control” from its name in 1997.

Post-war developments in quality

As U.S. quality was declining during the post-war selling frenzy, Japan was struggling to rebuild after the devastation of World War II. Although the Japanese were capable of producing high-quality war machines, the country had a reputation in the West for low-quality goods. Japan had very few natural resources and realized it needed to produce quality goods to build an export market.

In early 1946 Gen. Douglas MacArthur asked a radio engineer named Homer Sarasohn to go to Japan to help rebuild the country’s war-torn radio industry. MacArthur wanted to broadcast to Japanese households, but factories had been bombed during the war and couldn’t produce radio receivers, and most of their upper managers had been killed or jailed. Middle managers needed to move up and assume leadership responsibilities in the organizational hierarchies but lacked

decision-making experience. MacArthur ordered that training be conducted to remedy this, and the surviving managers in Japan attended.

Charles Protzman arrived to help Sarasohn in 1948, and together they prepared the textbook, The Principles of Industrial Management, which they used to train managers in manufacturing and mass production. The textbook contained a section on quality control, which some Americans objected to because they feared it would make Japan too much of a competitive threat. 

In 1950 Sarasohn invited Shewhart to teach statistical process control in Japan; however, Shewhart declined, so Sarasohn invited W. Edwards Deming. Deming introduced the Japanese to Joseph Juran’s 1951 book, Quality Control Handbook (McGraw-Hill, reprint 1988). The Japanese eventually invited Juran to Japan to teach them about quality. Deming was invited to lecture on statistical quality control by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) three years after the group started working with quality control.

Many people credit Juran and Deming with improving the quality of Japanese products; however, Juran believes that Japan’s quality revolution was the most important thing to happen after World War II, and that it would have happened even if he and Deming had not gone to Japan.

During his lectures Deming went beyond just teaching statistics and explained the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) production cycle to Japanese managers. He always called this the “Shewhart Cycle” because it was originally thought up by Walter Shewhart, although it was attributed to Deming. PDCA is used to ensure that the customer’s wants and needs are considered throughout the production of a product. The four steps begin during the product design phase and are repeated throughout the product’s manufacturing. Gabor notes that at that time, General Motors used to design a vehicle and then rely on sales pitches and advertising to sell it. In comparison, a company using plan-do-check-act will study what customers really want and design a product that meets these needs. Using PDCA helped Japan design and build products based on customers’ requirements.

In The New Economics (MIT Press, 2nd ed. 2000), Deming places the responsibility for quality on management’s shoulders rather than workers’, stressing that workers “can only try to do their jobs.” He counters the argument that workers need to work harder to protect their jobs by describing an efficient company with a high level of quality that nevertheless went out of business because it was producing a product that customers no longer wanted. “Job security and jobs are dependent on management’s foresight to design product and services that will entice customers and build a market,” he says. In Quality Productivity, and Competitive Position (MIT, 1982), Deming warns that “dependence on tariffs and quotas to reduce imports is temporary, and only prolongs the life of inefficiency and incompetence.” Regarding U.S. management, Deming is quoted by Rafael Aguayo in Dr. Deming: The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality (Touchstone, 1991) as saying, “Export anything except American management. At least not to friendly nations.”

Kaoru Ishikawa and quality circles

In his book What Is Total Quality Control? (Prentice Hall, first U.S. ed. 1988), statistician and Deming Prize winner Kaoru Ishikawa explains that if quality control places an emphasis only on inspection, then only one department within a company is involved. Then:

“All they need to do is stand at the exit and guard it in such a way as to prevent defective products from being shipped,” he says. “If a quality control program emphasizes the manufacturing process, however, involvement is extended to assembly lines, to subcontractors, and to the divisions of purchasing, production engineering, and marketing.”

Greg Watson in his article, “The Legacy of Ishikawa,” refers to Ishikawa as “the prime mover of quality in Japan” and “the father of quality circles.” Ishikawa was the son of Ichiro Ishikawa, who was the first president of Nippon Keidanren, the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations. Kaoru Ishikawa worked as a production engineer at Nissan Liquid Fuel Co. until 1947, when he was asked to take a position as a professor at the University of Tokyo. He joined the Quality Control Research Group of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers in 1949, and he spent parts of 1950 researching quality at various companies. Ishikawa believed that PDCA was the most important part of quality improvement, and that processes needed to be controlled to control product quality.

Ishikawa in What Is Total Quality Control? explains that all divisions within a company should be involved in quality control, and that this is how one meets the needs of the customer. He also says that workers and foremen must be good at what they do in order for quality control to function. However, it was not easy to educate workers and foremen in Japan during the late 1950s because there were too many of them, and they worked in factories throughout Japan. To address this problem, the Japan Broadcasting Corp. aired programs aimed at introducing quality control to workers and their supervisors. Supervisors asked for their own quality-related journal in 1962; Ishikawa worried that many supervisors would not read the journal, so he advocated quality circles, where those who read the journals could talk to those who didn’t.

Ishikawa states that quality circles are intended to contribute to the improvement and development of the company, respect humanity, build a happy workplace, and fully utilize human potential. Quality circles are to be organized on a voluntary basis from the bottom up and not top down, and they are a form of democratic management. There may be an improvement in working conditions because of quality circles, but these improved conditions are just a byproduct of quality circles and not their actual objective.

Juran gives an example of a Japanese quality circle that he encountered in 1966. Three ladies as young as 18 years old presented the results of their quality circle at a conference. The three were production workers, and they determined which assembly mistakes occurred the most. They found and implemented solutions to the problems that they identified. For example, an operation was typically forgotten, so they had a jig made that depended upon the forgotten parts for it to function correctly. That way the assembly operation could not be finished if the parts were missing. Without any help from engineers or management, the three production workers lowered the defect rate from 2.2 percent to 0.6 percent. Juran claims that judging quality circles only in terms of reductions in the defect rate is leaving out one of their main benefits: increased morale within the workforce because of increased employee participation.

According to Robinson’s The QC Circles, a group of Japanese visited the United States in 1968 and explained the benefits of quality circles; however, U.S. managers were experienced in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of scientific management, so they had low expectations of workers’ abilities, and quality circles got off to a slow start in America. Donald Dewar, who founded the Quality Circle Institute, which published Quality Circle Digest, the precursor to Quality Digest, was instrumental in introducing the concept to the United States. Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. studied quality circles in 1973 and launched a successful program that

influenced other companies such as Harley Davidson and General Motors. Quality circles had spread to England by 1977 and Asia by 1980.

Robinson gives the example of bottle inspectors in England who formed what he considered to be a successful quality circle. The inspectors’ main job was to check bottles for foreign contaminants, but they would be moved to other tasks when the machines broke down, which happened frequently. A quality circle studied the situation and recommended the creation of work stations for manual inspections that could be performed when the machines broke down. The benefit in cost savings were determined to be more than £400,000 per year.

In 1967 Juran wondered if quality circles could function outside of Japan. The answer turned out to be “yes.” America had quality circles by the mid-1970s, and the companies that used them reported millions of dollars in savings. Many business magazines wrote about how successful quality circles were, which generated more interest in them. During the late 1970s and and early 1980s, U.S. management often blamed workers for causing poor quality, and they saw quality circles as a way to let workers fix quality problems.

Many U.S. managers went to Japan to witness quality circles in action, but failed to notice that they were just one part of a bigger picture. Japanese companies that used quality circles also had engineers and managers working on quality problems and problem prevention, but the visiting U.S. managers failed to notice this. In his autobiography, Architect of Quality (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Juran observed that quality circles did produce spectacular results, but they were part of an overall system and not the single cause of quality in Japanese products. The American use of quality circles increased dramatically during the early 1980s and then quickly declined, although some circles were still going into the 1990s. The quality circles that did survive did so in a changed form.

A Chronology of Quality, Part 3

Quality in crisis

 Matthew Barsalou

While Japan was organizing quality circles, the United States started the zero defects movement based on the writings of Philip B. Crosby. In his book, Quality Is Free (Mentor, second ed. 1980), Crosby explains that mistakes are caused by lack of knowledge and lack of attention. He believed that lack of knowledge can be corrected through proven methods, but lack of attention requires a person to reappraise his morals because he has an attitude problem.

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Crosby proposed that simply paying attention is a major step on the way to achieving a zero defect rate. He also said that management must inform workers of the need for a zero defects mindset and claimed that 85 percent of all problems can be solved by the immediate supervisor. Of the remaining 15 percent, 13 percent can be solved within the next two levels of supervisors or departments.

In search of zero defects

In 1965, in his book What Is Total Quality Control (Prentice Hall, 1988), Kaoru Ishikawa recalls observing the zero defect movement first-hand. He predicted that it would fail because it was “a movement without tools” and became “a movement of mere will” that “emphasized that if everybody did his best, there would be no defects.” Ishikawa added that the United States was heavily influenced by Taylorisim, where “workers are regarded as machines” and “their humanity is ignored.”

Joseph Juran argued against zero defects programs as early as 1966, when he did a study showing those programs were primarily in defense and aerospace companies. He believed that zero defects programs were typically implemented at the request of the customer, which was the U.S. government. Juran visited companies that claimed to have been successful in reducing defects through the use of zero defects programs, but his visits failed to find any evidence of positive results.

During the early 1960s, Shigeo Shingo proposed a method of dropping the defect rate down close to zero using his successive check method. This method calls for workers to inspect each item they receive when they receive it. This would allow for the work of the person in the previous operation to be checked, and mistakes would be caught much more quickly than by using inspections or statistical process control at the end of the manufacturing process. In Zero Quality Control (Productivity Press, 1986), Shingo gives the example of one television manufacturing company that had a 15-percent defect rate. The company was able to reduce that to 6.5 percent by using quality circles and statistical process control. When the company began to use Shingo’s successive check method, the defect rate dropped to 0.016 percent.

Shingo explains that people forget things, and urging production workers to simply pay more attention is “as good as asking workers to become god.” He recommends poka-yoke, which means mistake-proofing—the use of a method or device that prevents a mistake from being made or makes the mistake obvious at a glance—therefore attaining zero defects. In 1961, Shingo was observing a manufacturing operation at Yamada Electric and watched a worker consistently forgetting to install one of the springs in a switch. He suggested a modification to the operation so that the worker would take the required springs out of a box and place them in a holder before they were assembled into the switch. If any springs were still in the holder after the switch was assembled, the worker would know that a spring had been forgotten.

In one of his articles, Juran claimed that most quality-related mistakes could be controlled by management, and that the remaining errors are caused by situations such as lack of worker skill or conflicting standards. He also reviewed the state of quality in different parts of the world and found that although U.S companies often had a quality department, quality-related training was lacking for supervisors, and it was often difficult for quality professionals to work with other departments within an organization.

Juran thought that Taylorism made sense at a time when workers and line supervisors didn’t have the skills or education for making decisions, but now planning and performing should be recombined in the United States. He found that Western European companies often had line supervisors with more authority than U.S. supervisors as well as workers with more skills than their U.S. counterparts, but he believed that Eastern European quality was hampered by central planning that protected companies from the demands of the market and a lack of competition. This protection made it difficult for them to solve quality-related problems. In 1969, Juran stated

that Japan’s quality revolution showed considerable promise for taking Japan to world leadership in the quality arena.

Beginning of the quality crisis

During the 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. automakers could not compete with the quality of their Japanese counterparts. Automotive components are designed with a tolerance range, and even when U.S. manufacturers were producing parts to specification, they couldn’t compete with Japanese parts. For example, Ford Motor Co. was producing transmissions but was also ordering the exact same transmission from Japan. Transmissions made in the United States were failing far more often than the Japanese transmissions, so Ford engineers disassembled the two types of units to determine what the differences were. The Ford-built transmissions were all within the specification limits, but the measurements were all at different points within the tolerance range. The Japanese transmissions were built exactly the same, which eliminated variability and resulted in a better transmission.

In 1980, Ford finally realized something was afoot in Japan, so members of Ford visited a Japanese assembly plant to see what was going on. The Ford people observed that Mazda could assemble a car comparable to Ford’s with only 60 percent of the effort and far fewer quality problems. Chrysler spent part of the 1980s being supported by the U.S. government but failed to implement lean methods. Ford and General Motors were both in severe financial trouble too, but adopted lean methods to help save themselves, according to Daniel Roos, Daniel T. Jones, and James P. Womack in The Machine That Changed the World (Free Press, 2007).

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the auto industry wasn’t the only manufacturing arena in which the United States had trouble competing with Japan. The quality of U.S. consumer goods was terrible compared to Japanese goods, so many Americans were buying Japanese products, which resulted in U.S. manufacturing companies losing market share and workers losing jobs.

U.S. television manufacturers accused Japan of using low wages and government subsidies to help Japanese television manufacturers. Zenith Radio Corp. even filed a dumping petition against Japan. However, Japanese manufacturers were using lean manufacturing methods to produce televisions, and this helped them to produce higher quality products at lower prices.

Although lean manufacturing isn’t the same as quality assurance, it does contribute to quality. Defective parts are identified more quickly because the parts are used soon after they are produced. During the mid-1970s, the failure rate for U.S. televisions was five times higher than for those made in Japan. Most consumers don’t purchase televisions frequently so may not have realized the quality difference between Japanese and U.S. televisions, but as Juran noted, bulk buyers, like hotels, did. During this time, nearly one-third of U.S. workers in the television manufacturing industry lost their jobs.

U.S. discovers quality and quality gurus

Crosby published Quality Is Free in 1979, which helped increase awareness of the need for quality. This was followed in 1980 by a wake-up call for U.S. industry when the documentary “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” from the series NBC White Paper aired on NBC. This documentary was created by Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason and introduced U.S. executives to W. Edwards Deming and the Japanese quality movement. Juran’s 1969 prediction that Japan would lead the world in quality had come true. U.S. manufacturers were still

producing as though they were in a seller’s market, but the documentary clearly illustrated that things had changed, and U.S. manufacturers would have to change how they did business.

“If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” was the tipping point that launched U.S. industries interest in quality; however, John Butman in Juran: A Lifetime of Influence   (Wiley, 1997) reports that Juran thought the documentary set the quality movement back by five years and disagreed with the credit it gave to Deming and himself for bringing quality to Japan.

There are men known as gurus in the field of quality. Although they aren’t the only ones who helped spread the word about quality, they are the most famous. In the United States, Deming, Juran, and Crosby are honored with guru status as are Armand Feigenbaum and Walter Shewhart. Among the quality gurus in Japan are Ishikawa, Shingo, Genichi Taguchi, and Taiichi Ohno.

In a 1990 article in Training magazine, writer Joseph Oberle is quoted as saying, “You can send your top managers to Crosby’s college, order Juran’s videotapes and materials from his institute, or join a waiting list to pay Deming to tell you, in person, what a fool you’ve been.” In his book, Architect of Quality (McGraw-Hill 2003), Juran said that Deming believed statistics alone could solve quality problems, and that total quality control was unnecessary because statistical quality control is already “total.”

Each of the gurus had a different method and didn’t always agree with each other. In Quality or Else (Mariner Books, 1993), Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason provide several examples of the gurus’ attitudes toward each other, including Deming making fun of Crosby’s concept of zero defects by sarcastically asking, “How about do it right the next time? Makes just as much sense.”

In another vignette, Crosby describes the statistics expert Taguchi as an OK person, but one must have a doctorate in math or economics to understand him; that most American quality professionals wouldn’t understand him, yet they’d say “if it’s incomprehensible in Japanese, it must be good for you.”

In Quality and Me (Jossey Bass, 1999), Crosby writes that he respected the work of Deming and Juran but they were in different businesses: Deming an expert in statistics, and Juran an expert in quality control and quality engineering. But he was dealing with quality management, which is not quality control or statistics. He considered their ideas irrelevant to his work. 

The increased interest in quality during the 1980s had a big effect on the American Society for Quality Control (ASQC). At the end of the 1970s, ASQC only had 32,000 members. Most managers seemed to view the society as an organization for low-level technical people. Most members were in the manufacturing sector, and few were in positions higher than supervisor or engineer. By the end of the 1990s, however, service-sector membership had grown significantly, and many of the people in the ASQC were in high-level management positions. During the early 1980s, the papers presented at ASQC conferences were primarily of a technical nature, but by the middle of the 1990s, nearly half of the papers were management-oriented. In 1997 the ASQC changed its name to the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and focused on training for quality professionals, spreading the news about new ideas for quality improvement.

A Chronology of Quality, Part 4

Quality today

 Matthew Barsalou

The Six Sigma methodology is used to identify and control variables that affect the output of a process. In his book Quality Planning and Analysis (McGraw-Hill, 4th ed. 2000), Frank M. Gyrna explains that Six Sigma “is a collection of managerial and statistical concepts and techniques that focus on reducing variation in processes and preventing deficiencies in product.” A process that is capable of operating at a Six Sigma level produces, on average, only 3.4 defects per million units.

Quality and Six Sigma

In an interview with T. M. Kubiak, Armand Feigenbaum explained that GE built a quality system around statistical quality control that eventually came to be referred to as total quality management. Feigenbaum told Kubiak that when Bill Smith at Motorola was asked to find a way to use statistical quality control in nonmanufacturing areas like banking, he created Six Sigma under the leadership of Motorola CEO Robert Galvin.

Mike Carnell, a former Motorola employee,  explains that Motorola developed Six Sigma during the 1980s as a survival strategy because it was having difficulties competing with Japan. There is some criticism that Six Sigma only works for manufacturing, but Motorola also implemented it in human resources, purchasing, and accounting. At Motorola, Six Sigma was just one part of a larger transformation that included cooperation between departments, employee participation, and financial improvement, as well as cycle time reduction. Necip Doganaksoy and Gerald Hahn report that Six Sigma led to Motorola saving almost a billion dollars during a three-year period and was instrumental in the company achieving the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award.

GE also saved more than a billion dollars in one year using Six Sigma.

Ford Motor Co. uses Six Sigma to address quality issues as well. For example, the Ford Mustang hood latch wouldn’t close without excessive force. Customers were unhappy with this situation, so a Six Sigma team was assigned to investigate the problem. The team studied vehicles on the production line to see where the problem was occurring and then simulated the conditions on a machine that could measure all the variables. They determined the root cause was excessive variation and experimented until they found a latch angle that would eliminate the problem. Estimated cost savings were $283,000 for that year and customer satisfaction ratings rose.

As a quality tool, Six Sigma is starting to be used regularly outside of manufacturing. The U.S. Navy has successfully used Six Sigma to reduce costs and turnaround time for aircraft repair at a

facility in San Diego. The repair facility reduced aircraft refurbishing time from 192 days to 134 days and saved millions of dollars.

The U.S federal government is discussing the possibility of using Six Sigma in the fight against terrorism.

Six Sigma has evolved into lean Six Sigma (LSS). In the book, What Is Lean Six Sigma? (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Michael L. George reports that GE achieved great improvements in quality using Six Sigma, but the methodology was not being used to address time. So GE CEO Jack Welsh called for expanding Six Sigma to reduce lead time in addition to quality improvement. Lean tools were coupled with Six Sigma, resulting in the lean Six Sigma concept.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is used to identify key customers and to design or completely redesign a product that meets those customers’ needs. Statistical tools are used to create a design process that meets manufacturing and service requirements and for verifying that a design is reliable and meets cost requirements.

Quality awards and certifications

During the 1980s, U.S. industry and the federal government voiced concern about low quality in American-made products and the country’s lack of competitiveness in the world market; multiple groups were formed to study the problem. One of these recommended creating a national quality award similar to Japan’s Deming Prize. About a month later a conference was held featuring President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan, and Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige as speakers.

During the conference, a report was released calling for a national quality prize, which was to be a medal awarded annually by the president. In September 1985,  a committee to establish a national quality award was formed by corporate business leaders from the American Society for Quality Control, NASA, McDonnell Douglas Corp., Ford, and other organizations. In 1986, legislation was written for the award, and the bill passed Congress in 1987. Before the bill passed into law, Secretary Baldrige died from a rodeo accident, and the award was named in his honor. The Baldrige Award is administered by the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, which is managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The award recognizes U.S. organizations for achievements in quality and performance excellence.

By the late 1990s there was a quality award program in nearly every U.S. state—all based on the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence.

In 1988, Utah State University created The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence to honor Shigeo Shingo, the industrial engineer and thought leader whose management and improvement concepts and techniques are a fundamental part of the Toyota Production System. The Shingo Prize recognizes business excellence around the world.

European countries started creating quality awards in 1991. By 2001 there were 19 different European quality awards, so to consolidate, the European Foundation for Quality Management created the European Foundation for Quality Management Award, now known as the EFQM Excellence Award, which has some similarities to the Baldridge Award.

Quality standards

The first industrial standards organizations were formed in Great Britain in 1901, and by 1930 many countries started to use national standards organizations. The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published the quality management system standard, ISO 9000, in 1987. The ISO 9000 series of standards has been adopted around the world. 

In the article, “The Evolution of Six Sigma,” Jim Folaron warns that “the creation of ISO 9000 helped define many of the elements of sound quality practice, but it did not assure the product’s goodness or fitness for use; it only addressed consistency in the process. For example, a company that sells cement life jackets could be ISO 9000 certified.”

In 1994, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler introduced QS-9000 as a U.S. automobile industry quality standard. The automotive subsuppliers requested a single standard because they had been subjected to different standards for each company they supplied parts to. The “Big Three” U.S. automakers based QS-9000 on ISO 9000 but didn’t copy it directly because it lacked elements that they needed in a standard, such as manufacturing capabilities and quality planning. Similarly, the aerospace industry created AS9000 and telecommunications created TL9000.

In Italy, Fiat Auto and IVECO worked together with 85 suppliers to create AVSQ as an Italian automobile industry quality standard, and Renault, Peugeot and Citroen worked together with about 300 suppliers to create the French automobile industry quality standard EAQF. BMW, Opel, Audi, Daimler Benz, Volkswagen, and Ford Werke, together with 500 suppliers, created VDA 6 as a German automobile industry quality standard.

ISO attempted to convince all the automobile manufacturers to use the ISO 9001 quality standard due to the number of standards that had been created, but automakers found the ISO standard to be insufficient for their industry. Attempts were made to modify ISO 9001 for the automobile industry, but since the changes that were needed were not relevant to companies outside the auto industry, a new standard, ISO TS16949, was created and released in 1998.

Conclusion

Quality guru Armand Feigenbaum believed that quality management can help lead U.S. industry out of the current financial crisis. He advised companies to make improvements in product development and supplier quality, to recognize quality costs and leadership in management, and overhaul human resources by avoiding management lectures and motivational programs. Instead, he recommended developing and encouraging employees to promote openness and trust within companies.

Lessons from the other quality gurus should be revisited, too. These leaders helped Japan rebuild its war-torn industries during the 1950s and helped America overcome the quality crisis of the 1980s; perhaps it is time for companies to look again to these lessons to find a way out of the current financial mess.

Quality assurance, quality control, and quality management must be integrated and used together to ensure overall quality. Statistical process control can signal when a process is no longer producing parts in specification, but it doesn’t matter if the parts are in specification if the wrong parts are being produced. Quality management provides a system to ensure that such mistakes don’t happen, but using quality management without quality assurance or quality control is also a mistake because defective parts can be produced even if the processes are functioning properly. Inspection can still play a role in modern quality; it may be needed to control the

manual assembly of unique products, or in situations where there is a danger to life or limb in the event of a failure. However, companies shouldn’t rely on inspection exclusively because, as Harold F. Dodge famously said, “You cannot inspect quality into a product.”

The ideal quality system is one that uses quality management to define the processes that will ensure that a company is producing what the customer wants and needs. Quality assurance is used to ensure that the production system is working properly, and quality control ensures that the product is produced in accordance with standards. Quality assurance, quality control, and quality management are not standalone concepts; they are overlapping and complementary tools.

“The modern quality movement brings together ideas from, for example, systems analysis, operations research, problem solving, statistics, engineering, group dynamics, management science, human genetics, and organizational development,” says George E. P. Box in “Total Quality: Its Origins and Its Future.” “The quality movement will, from time to time, undergo healthy changes and may even be called by different names. I am sure, however, that it is here to stay and can be of great benefit to all of us.”

About The Author

Matthew Barsalou

Matthew Barsalou is a Statistical Problem Resolution Master Black Belt in BorgWarner Turbo Systems Engineering GmbH’s problem resolution and statistical methods department. He is a Smarter Solutions certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, ASQ-certified Six Sigma Black Belt, quality engineer, and quality technician, and a TÜV-certified quality manager, quality management representative, and auditor. He has a bachelor of science in industrial sciences, a master of liberal studies with emphasis in international business, and has a master of science in business administration and engineering from the Wilhelm Büchner Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany. He is author of the books Root Cause Analysis: A Step-By-Step Guide to Using the Right Tool at the Right Time, Statistics for Six Sigma Black Beltsand The ASQ Pocket Guide to Statistics for Six Sigma Black Belts.

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