Quality Gurus Quality Gurus

MBAD 785 Total Quality Management

To fully understand the TQM movement, we need to look at the philosophies of notable individuals who have shaped the evolution of TQM. Their philosophies and teachings have contributed to our knowledge and understanding of quality today. Their individual contributions are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Quality Gurus and Their Contributions The term used for todays new concept of quality is total quality management or TQM. Figure 5-3 presents a timeline of the old and new concepts of quality. You can see that the old concept is reactive, designed to correct quality problems after they occur. The new concept is proactive, designed to build quality into the product and process design. Next, we look at the individuals who have shaped our understanding of quality.

Figure: Timeline showing the differences between old and new concepts of quality Walter A. Shewhart studied randomness and recognized that variability existed in all manufacturing processes. He developed quality control charts that are used to identify whether the variability in the process is random or due to an assignable cause, such as poor workers or mis-calibrated machinery. He stressed that eliminating variability improves quality. His work created the foundation for todays statistical process control, and he is often referred to as the grandfather of quality control.

W. Edwards Deming is often referred to as the father of quality control. He was a statistics professor at New York University in the 1940s. After World War II he assisted many Japanese companies in improving quality. The Japanese regarded him so highly that in 1951 they established the Deming Prize, an annual award given to firms that

Quality Gurus MBAD 785 Total Quality Management demonstrate outstanding quality. It was almost 30 years later that American businesses began adopting Demings philosophy. A number of elements of Demings philosophy depart from traditional notions of quality. The first is the role management should play in a companys quality improvement effort. Historically, poor quality w as blamed on workerson their lack of productivity, laziness, or carelessness. However, Deming pointed out that only 15 percent of quality problems are actually due to worker error. The remaining 85 percent are caused by processes and systems, including poor management. Deming said that it is up to management to correct system problems and create an environment that promotes quality and enables workers to achieve their full potential. He believed that managers should drive out any fear employees have of identifying quality problems, and that numerical quotas should be eliminated. Proper methods should be taught, and detecting and eliminating poor quality should be everyones responsibility. Deming outlined his philosophy on quality in his famous 14 Points. These points are principles that help guide companies in achieving quality improvement. The principles are founded on the idea that upper management must develop a commitment to quality and provide a system to support this commitment that involves all employees and suppliers. Deming stressed that quality improvements cannot happen without organizational change that comes from upper management. Below are the 14 Points Dr. Deming taught for the transformation of management. Over the years Dr. Deming made some minor changes to the wording, but you will be able to understand the essence of his message when you read the wording used below. 1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service. Dr. Deming suggests a radical new definition of a companys role: A better way to make money is to stay in business and provide jobs through innovation, research, constant improvement and maintenance. 2. Adopt the new philosophy. For the new economic age, management need to take leadership for change into a learning organization. Furthermore, we need a new belief in which mistakes and negativism are unacceptable. 3. Cease dependence on mass inspection. Eliminate the need for mass inspection by building quality into the product. 4. End awarding business on price. Instead, aim at minimum total cost and move towards single suppliers. 5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service. Improvement is not a one-time effort. Management is obligated to continually look for ways to reduce waste and improve quality. 6. Institute training. Too often, workers have learned their job from other workers who have never been trained properly. They are forced to follow unintelligible instructions. They cant do their jobs well because no one tells them how to do so. 7. Institute leadership. The job of a supervisor is not to tell people what to do nor to punish them, but to lead. Leading consists of helping people to do a better job and to learn by objective methods. 8. Drive out fear. Many employees are afraid to ask questions or to take a position, even when they do not understand what their job is or what is right or wrong. They will continue to do things the wrong way, or not do them at all. The economic losses from fear are appalling. To assure better quality and productivity, it is necessary that people feel secure. The only stupid question is the one that is not asked. 9. Break down barriers between departments. Often a companys departments or units are competing with each other or have goals that conflict. They do not work as a team, therefore they cannot solve or foresee problems. Even worse, one departments goal may cause trouble for another. 10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and numerical targets for the workforce. These never help anybody do a good job. Let workers formulate their own slogans. Then they will be committed to the contents.

Quality Gurus MBAD 785 Total Quality Management 11. Eliminate numerical quotas or work standards. Quotas take into account only numbers, not quality or methods. They are usually a guarantee of inefficiency and high cost. A person, in order to hold a job, will try to meet a quota at any cost, including doing damage to his company. 12. Remove barriers to taking pride in workmanship. People are eager to do a good job and distressed when they cannot. Too often, misguided supervisors, faulty equipment and defective materials stand in the way of good performance. These barriers must be removed. 13. Institute a vigorous programme of education. Both management and the work force will have to be educated in the new knowledge and understanding, including teamwork and statistical techniques. 14. Take action to accomplish the transformation. It will require a special top management team with a plan of action to carry out the quality mission. Workers cannot do it on their own, nor can managers. A critical mass of people in the company must understand the 14 points. Joseph M. Juran After W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Joseph Juran is considered to have had the greatest impact on quality management. Juran originally worked in the quality program at Western Electric. He became better known in 1951, after the publication of his book Quality Control Handbook. In 1954 he went to Japan to work with manufacturers and teach classes on quality. Though his philosophy is similar to Demings, there are some differences. Whereas Deming stressed the need for an organizational transformation, Juran believes that implementing quality initiatives should not require such a dramatic change and that quality management should be embedded in the organization. One of Jurans significant contributions is his focus on the definition of quality and the cost of quality. Juran is credited with defining quality as fitness for use rather than simply conformance to specifications. As we have learned in this chapter, defining quality as fitness for use takes into account customer intentions for use of the product, instead of only focusing on technical specifications. Juran is also credited with developing the concept of cost of quality, which allows us to measure quality in dollar terms rather than on the basis of subjective evaluations. Juran is well known for originating the idea of the quality trilogy: quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement. The first part of the trilogy, quality planning, is necessary so that companies identify their customers, product requirements, and overriding business goals. Processes should be set up to ensure that the quality standards can be met. The second part of the trilogy, quality control, stresses the regular use of statistical control methods to ensure that quality standards are met and to identify variations from the standards. The third part of the quality trilogy is quality improvement. According to Juran, quality improvements should be continuous as well as breakthrough. Together with Deming, Juran stressed that to implement continuous improvement workers need to have training in proper methods on a regular basis. Armand V. Feigenbaum is another quality leader, who introduced the concept of total quality control. In his 1961 book Total Quality Control, he outlined his quality principles in 40 steps. Feigenbaum took a total system approach to quality. He promoted the idea of a work environment where quality developments are integrated throughout the entire organization, where management and employees have a total commitment to improve quality, and people learn from each others successes. This philosophy was adapted by the Japanese and termed company-wide quality control. Feigenbaums philosophy is summarized in his Three Steps to Quality, which is described below. Quality leadership: this is evident when the management emphasizes on sound planning rather than reacting to failures. The management must maintain a constant focus and lead the quality effort. Modern quality technology: the traditional quality development processes cannot resolve 80 to 90 per cent of quality problems. This task requires the integration of office staff, engineers as well as the shop-floor workers who continually evaluate and implement new techniques to satisfy customers in the future.

Quality Gurus MBAD 785 Total Quality Management Organizational commitment: continuous training and motivation of the entire workforce as well as an integration of quality in business planning stage indicates the importance of quality and provides the means for including it in all respects of the organizations activities. Key elements of Feigenbaums Philosophy of Quality Control 1. Total quality refers to a system of integrating development, maintenance and improvement efforts in an organization that will enable engineering, marketing, production and service to function at an optimal level while achieving customer satisfaction. 2. The control aspect of quality control should involve setting quality standards, appraising performance relative to these standards, taking corrective action when the standards are not met and planning for improvement in the standards. 3. Factors that affect quality can be divided into two major categories technological and human. The human factor is the more critical factor. 4. Operating quality costs can be divided into four categories: prevention cost, appraisal cost, internal failure costs and external failure costs. 5. It is important to control quality at the source. Phillip B. Crosby Philip B. Crosby is another recognized guru in the area of TQM. He worked in the area of quality for many years, first at Martin Marietta and then, in the 1970s, as the vice president for quality at ITT. He developed the phrase Do it right the first time and the notion of zero defects, arguing that no amount of defects should be considered acceptable. He scorned the idea that a small number of defects is a normal part of the operating process because systems and workers are imperfect. Instead, he stressed the idea of prevention. To promote his concepts, Crosby wrote a book titled Quality Is Free, which was published in 1979. He became famous for coining the phrase quality is free and for pointing out the many costs of quality, which include not only the costs of wasted labor, equipment time, scrap, rework, and lost sales, but also organizational costs that are hard to quantify. Crosby stressed that effort to improve quality more than pay for themselves because these costs are prevented. Therefore, quality is free. Like Deming and Juran, Crosby stressed the role of management in the quality improvement effort and the use of statistical control tools in measuring and monitoring quality. While Crosby, like Deming and Juran, stresses on the importance of the managements commitment and error -cause removal, some aspects of Crosbys approach to quality are quite different from Demings. Zero defects, central to Crosbys philosophy, was criticized by Deming as being directed at the wrong people (workers) and generating worker frustration and resentment. Goal setting, central to Crosbys theory, was also criticized for leading to negative accomplishment. The reality is that Deming was probably reacting to the inappropriate use of slogans and goals Deming may not have condemned them if they had always been used properly within the Crosby system. The essence of Crosbys teaching is contained in what he calls the four absolutes of quality. The definition: Quality is conformance to requirements, not goodness. The system: Prevention, not appraisal The performance standard: Zero defects The measurement: The price of non-conformance to retirements, not quality indices. Crobys 14 Steps

Quality Gurus MBAD 785 Total Quality Management 1. Management commitment: To clarify the managements stand on quality. 2. Quality improvement team: To run the quality improvement programme. 3. Quality measurement: To display current and potential non-conformance problems in the manner that permits objective evaluation and corrective action. 4. Cost of quality: To define the ingredients of the cost of quality, and explain its use as a management tool. 5. Quality awareness: To provide a method of raising personal concern among the personnel in the company towards the conformance of the product and service, and the reputation of the company on the issue of quality. 6. Corrective action: To provide a systematic method of resolving the problems identified through actions taken previously. 7. Zero defects planning: To examine the various activities that must be conducted in preparation for formally launching the zero defects programme. 8. Supervisor training: To define the type of training supervisors need in order actively carryout their roles with regard to the quality improvement programme. 9. Zero defects day: To create an event that will let all employees realize, through a personal experience, that there has been a change. 10. Goal Setting: To turn pledges and commitments into action by encouraging individuals to establish improvement goals for themselves and their groups. 11. Error cause removal: To give individual employees a method of communicating to the management, the situations that make it difficult for employees to meet the pledges to improve. 12. Recognition: To appreciate those who participate. 13. Quality councils: To bring together professionals in the domain of quality for planned communication on a regular basis with the workforce and management alike. 14. Do it over again: To emphasize that the quality improvement programme never ends. Kaoru Ishikawa Kaoru Ishikawa is best known for the development of quality tools called cause-and-effect diagrams, also called fishbone or Ishikawa diagrams. These diagrams are used for quality problem solving. He was the first quality guru to emphasize the importance of the internal customer, the next person in the production process. He was also one of the first to stress the importance of total company quality control, rather than just focusing on products and services. Dr. Ishikawa believed that everyone in the company needed to be united with a shared vision and a common goal. He stressed that quality initiatives should be pursued at every level of the organization and that all employees should be involved. Dr. Ishikawa was a proponent of implementation of quality circles, which are small teams of employees that volunteer to solve quality problems. He is also known as the father of quality circles for his role in launching Japans quality movement in the 1960s. Ishikawa advocated the following principles: Quality is a company wide issue and must wield an all-pervasive influence on the way every issue of business is conducted. Seven simplified tools of quality control need to be used by all people in an organization. Quality circles.

Kaoru Ishikawa is credited with developing the idea of companywide quality control in Japan. He pioneered the use of quality circles and championed the use of quality tools to understand the root causes of problems. Ishikawa said that seven basic tools were indispensible for quality control. These are Pareto analysis, fishbone diagrams, stratification, tally charts, histograms, scatter diagrams and control charts. Ishikawa argued that with these tools,

Quality Gurus MBAD 785 Total Quality Management managers and staff could tackle and solve the quality problems facing them. Ishikawa was the first quality guru to emphasize the importance of the internal customer, the next person in the production process. Ishikawa emphasized on quality as a way of management. He influenced the development of participative, bottomup view of quality, which became the trademark of the Japanese approach to quality management. Some of the key elements of his philosophy are: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) (vii) (viii) (ix) (x) (xi) Quality begins with education and ends with education The first step in quality is to know the customer requirements The ideal state of quality control occurs when inspection is no longer necessary Remove the root cause, not the symptoms Quality control is the responsibility of all workers and all divisions Do not confuse means with the objectives Put quality first and set your sights on long-term profits Market is the entrance and exit of quality Top management must not show anger when facts are presented by subordinates Ninety-five per cent of problems in a company can be solved with simple tools for analysis and problem solving Data without dispersion information (variability) are false data

Genichi Taguchi Dr. Genichi Taguchi is a Japanese quality expert known for his work in the area of product design. He estimates that as much as 80 percent of all defective items are caused by poor product design. Taguchi stresses that companies should focus their quality efforts on the design stage, as it is much cheaper and easier to make changes during the product design stage than later during the production process. Taguchi is known for applying a concept called design of experiment to product design. This method is an engineering approach that is based on developing robust design, a design that results in products that can perform over a wide range of conditions. Taguchis philosophy is based on the idea that it is easier to design a product that can perform over a wide range of environmental conditions than it is to control the environmental conditions. Taguchi has also had a large impact on todays view of the costs of quality. He pointed out that the traditional view of costs of conformance to specifications is incorrect, and proposed a different way to look at these costs. Lets briefly look at Dr. Taguchis view of quality costs. Recall that conformance to specification specifies a target value for the product with specified tolerances, say 5.00 0.20. According to the traditional view of conformance to specifications, losses in terms of cost occur if the product dimensions fall outside of the specified limits. This is shown in Figure 5-4.

Quality Gurus

MBAD 785 Total Quality Management Figure 5.4: Traditional view of the cost of nonconformance

However, Dr. Taguchi noted that from the customers view there is little difference whether a product falls just outside or just inside the control limits. He pointed out that there is a much greater difference in the quality of the product between making the target and being near the control limit. He also stated that the smaller the variation around the target, the better the quality. Based on this he proposed the following: as conformance values move away from the target, loss increases as a quadratic function. This is called the Taguchi loss function and is shown in Figure 5-5.

Figure 5.5: Taguchi view of the cost of nonconformancethe Taguchi loss function According to the function, smaller differences from the target result in smaller costs: the larger the differences, the larger the cost. The Taguchi loss function has had a significant impact in changing the view of quality cost. Eight Dimensions of Quality Performance. Performance refers to the primary operating characteristics of a product. For example, for an automobile, these characteristics would be acceleration, handling, cruising speed and comfort and for a television set, they would include sound picture clarity, color and ability to receive distant stations. Features. Features are the bells and whistles of products, those secondary characteristics that supplement the basic functioning of the products. Examples include automatics tuners on a TV set, power steering in automobiles etc. Reliability. Reliability reflects the probability of a product failing within a specified period of time. Commons measures of reliability are the mean time to first failure (MTFF), the mean time between failures (MTBF), and the failure rate per unit time. Because these measures require a product to be in use for some period, they are more relevant to durable goods than they are to products and services that are consumed instantly. Conformance. A related dimension of quality is conformance, or the degree to which product design and operating characteristics match pre-established standards. Durability. Durability is a measure of a products life; it has both economic and technical dimensions. Simply stated, durability can be defined as the period of use one gets from a product before it physically deteriorates. For example, a light bulb needs to be replaced after a certain number of hours of use when filament burns up.

Quality Gurus MBAD 785 Total Quality Management Servicablility or the speed of competency and efficiency of repair. Consumers are concerned not only about a product breaking down, but also about the elapsed time before service is restored, the tidiness with which service appointments are kept, the nature of their dealings with service personnel, and the frequency with which service calls or repairs fail to resolve outstanding problems. Responsiveness can be assessed more objectively if it is measured by the mean time to repair (MTTR). Aesthetics is more subjective. It is closely related to user-based approach. Aesthetics- how a product looks, feels, sounds, tastes or smells are clearly a matter of personal judgment and reflection of individual preference. Perceived quality can be as subjective as assessment of aesthetics. Because consumers do not always possess complete information about product attributes, they frequently rely on indirect measures when comparing brands, all the other dimensions may have an influence on perceived quality. Different approaches to product quality focus on a different dimension of quality. The product-based approach focuses on performance, features and durability; the user-based approach focuses on aesthetics and perceived quality; the manufacturing-based approach focuses on conformance and reliability. TQM INFRASTRUCTURE: 7 ELEMENTS FOR SUCCESS There are seven elements of organizational infrastructure for implementing TQM: 1. Goals must be set for the company's TQM implementation and for the company's business. 2. An organizational setting must be provided. 3. Training and education must be provided. 4. TQM must be promoted throughout the company. 5. Operational success stories resulting from the implementation of TQM must be diffused through the rest of the company. 6. There must be appropriate awards and incentives to mobilize TQM. 7. The implementation effort must be monitored and diagnosed by top management.