TQM & MIS in Civil Engineering

Definitions of Quality
• Juran defines quality as- fitness for use in terms of design, conformance, availability,
safety, and field use. His approach is based customer, top-down management and
technical methods.
• ISO 9000, an international quality management system, defines quality as inherent
characteristics that the products or services possess in order to meet the requirements
of the customer.
• Quality is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that
bear on its ability to satisfy given needs. ( American Society for Quality).
• Quality, an inherent or distinguishing characteristic, a degree or grade of excellence.
(American Heritage Dictionary, 1996)
• 'Quality' is generally referred to a parameter which decides the inferiority or
superiority of a product or service. It is a measure of goodness to understand how a
product meets its specifications.
• Crosby re-defined quality to mean conformity to standards set by the industry or
organization that must align with customer needs.
• W. Edwards Deming defined quality as follows: Good quality means a predictable
degree of uniformity and dependability with a quality standard suited to the
customer.
• Meeting & exceeding present and future requirements of customer on a continuous
basis.- Charantimath,2006
Reasons for poor quality:
• Poor Communication among project participants
• Poor planning & scheduling
• Poor Productivity.
• Insufficient Skills & lack of training.
• Lack of site layout studies.
• Inadequate review of Design & engineering Drawings.
• Unclear or incomplete drawings & specifications
• Poor checking, inspection, testing (internal /external)
• Constructability problems.
• Improper Soil analysis
• Poor selection of suppliers, vendors & sub-contractors.
• Delayed purchase of materials.
• Poor Quality improvement programs.
• Poor document Control
 Contributions by Quality Gurus
1William Edwards Deming (1900-93)
American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management
consultant
• Deming’s 14 Points on Quality Management
1. Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
4. End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by
working with a single supplier.
5. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production and service.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Adopt and institute leadership.
8. Drive out fear.
9. Break down barriers between staff areas.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce.
11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, and eliminate the annual
rating or merit system.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone.
14. Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation.
• Deming’s Theory of Profound Knowledge
In order to promote cooperation, Deming espouses Profound knowledge involves
expanded views and an understanding of the seemingly individual yet truly
interdependent elements that compose the larger system, the company. Deming
believed that every worker has nearly unlimited potential if placed in an environment
that adequately supports, educates, and nurtures senses of pride and responsibility; he
stated that the majority--85 percent--of a worker's effectiveness is determined by his
environment and only minimally by his own skill
 Understanding (and appreciation) of Systems
- optimizing sub-systems sub-optimizes the total system
- The majority of defects come from systems, the responsibility of management (e.g.,
machines not in good order, defective material, etc.
 Knowledge of Statistics (variation, capability, uncertainty in data, etc.)
- To identify where problems are, and point managers and workers toward solutions
 Knowledge of Psychology (Motivation)
- People are afraid of failing and not being recognized, so they fear how data will be
used against them
 Theory of Knowledge
- understanding that management in any form is a prediction, and is based on
assumptions
PDCA Cycle (The Deming Wheel)
• Walter Shewhart originated the concept of the PDCA cycle and introduced it to
Deming. Deming promoted the idea widely in the 1950s and it became known
as the Deming Wheel or the Deming cycle.
• The PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle consists of four steps or stages which
must be gone through to get from `problem-faced' to `problem solved.’
Repetition of these steps forms a cycle of continual improvement:
• Plan for changes to bring about improvement.
Do changes on a small scale first to trial them.
Check to see if changes are working and to investigate selected processes.
Act to get the greatest benefit from change.
• ========================================================
 2Philip Crosby (1926-2001)
"Do It Right the First Time
• Philip Crosby was Born in West Virginia in 1926. After serving in WWII and the
Korean War he has worked for Crosley, Martin-Marietta and ITT where he was
corporate vice president for 14 years. Philip Crosby Associates, Inc., founded in
1979, was his management consulting firm that served hundreds of companies.
Since retiring in 1991 he has founded Career IV, Inc., Philip Crosby Associates
II, Inc. and the Quality College. Phil Crosby died in August, 2001, but his
legacy will live on in better quality in thousands of organizations.

• Phil Crosby excelled was in finding a terminology for quality His books,
• "Quality Without Tears" and
• "Quality is Free"
• were easy to read, so people read them.
• popularized the idea of the "cost of poor quality", that is, figuring out how much it
really costs to do things ideas came from his experience on an assembly line.
• He focused on zero defects.
Mr. Crosby defined quality as a conformity to certain specifications set forth by
management and not some vague concept of "goodness." These specifications are not
arbitrary either; they must be set according to customer needs and wants.
• Mr. Crosby was quick to point out, however, that zero defects is not something
that originates on the assembly line.
• To create a manufacturing process that has zero defects management must set
the tone and atmosphere for employees to follow.
 • If management does not create a system by which zero defects are clearly the
objective then employees are not to blame when things go astray and defects
occur.
• The benefit for companies of such a system is a dramatic decrease in wasted
resources and time spent producing goods that consumer's do not want.
• Four Absolutes of Quality Management
• Quality is defined as conformance to requirements, not as 'goodness' or 'elegance'.
• The system for causing quality is prevention, not appraisal.
• The performance standard must be Zero Defects, not "that's close enough".
• The measurement of quality is the Price of Nonconformance, not indices.

3 Joseph M.Juran (1904-2008)is best known for

• Juran's Trilogy - Juran's trilogy consists of Quality Planning, Quality Control,
and Quality Improvement.
• 10 Steps of Quality Improvement
• Quality Control Handbook — Juran published the first edition of the Quality
Control Handbook in 1951.
• Cost of Quality - Juran defined the Cost of Quality as tangible and intangible
costs.
• Juran, like Deming, was invited to Japan in 1954 by the Union of Japanese
Scientists and Engineers (JUSE). His work pioneered the management
dimensions of planning, organizing, and controlling and focussed on the
responsibility of management to achieve quality and the need for setting goals.
• Juran defines quality as fitness for use in terms of design, conformance,
availability, safety, and field use. His approach is based customer, top-down
management and technical methods.
Juran Trilogy
• The Juran Trilogy is an improvement cycle that is meant to reduce the cost of poor
quality by planning quality into the product / process.
• Quality Planning
• Quality Control
• Quality Improvement
•
• Quality Planning: In the planning stage, it is critical to define who the customers are
and to define their needs (voice of the customer). Once the customer needs are
identified, define the requirements for the product / process / service / system, etc.,
and develop them for operations along with the respective stakeholder expectations.
Planning activities are done through a multidisciplinary team, with the involvement of
key stakeholders.
• Quality Control: During the control phase, determine what needs to be measured
(what forms of data and from which processes?), and set a goal for performance.
Obtain feedback by measuring actual performance, and act on the gap between
performance and the goal. In Statistical Process Control (SPC), there are several tools
that could be used in the control phase of the Juran Trilogy: such as the 7 QC tools
and other statistical process control methods.
• Quality Improvement: There are four different strategies to improvement that could
be applied for improvements:
 • Repair: reactive approach - fix what is broken
• Refinement: proactive approach - continually improve a process that isn’t broken
• Renovation: improvement through innovation or technological advancement
• Reinvention: most demanding approach – abandon the current practices and start over
with a clean slate.
Juran proposed ten steps to quality improvement:
• Build awareness of the need and opportunity to improve
• Set goals for that improvement
• Create plans to reach the goals
• Provide training
• Conduct projects to solve problems
• Report on progress
• Give recognition for success
• Communicate results
• Keep score
• Maintain momentum
Kaoru Ishikawa (1915 - 1989)

A Japanese professor, advisor and motivator with respect to the innovative

developments within the field of quality management. Kaoru Ishikawa is best known for the
development of the concept of the fishbone diagram, which is also known as the "Ishikawa
diagram".
• Ishikawa Diagram - Also known as Cause-and-effect Diagram or Fishbone Diagram.
• Seven Basic Quality Tools - Seven Basic Quality Tools were first emphasized by
Ishikawa.
• Quality Circles - Ishikawa introduced the concept of Quality Circles. This is an
essential part of Total Quality Management (TQM).
• Company-wide Quality - Ishikawa believed that quality must be company-wide.
• ==========================================================

Genichi Taguchi

• The executive director of the American Supplier Institute, the director of the Japan
Industrial Technolgy Institute, and an honorary professor at Nanjing Institue of
Technology in China.
• Taguchi Methods- a methodology to improve quality and reduce costs

Taguchi's methodology is geared towards pushing the concepts of quality and

reliability back into the design stage, i.e. prior to manufacturing.

His method provides an efficient technique for designing product tests prior to
beginning manufacturing.
 Taguchi methodology is fundamentally a prototyping technique that enables
engineers/ designers to produce a robust design that can survive repetitive
manufacturing to deliver the functionality required by the customer.

Taguchi considered the design to be more critical than Quality Control in

manufacturing processes.

• Taguchi Loss Function

• Design of Experiments

• Robust Design
• Quality Engineering

• ===========================================================

Quality Assurance
• Quality Assurance is popularly known as QA Testing, is defined as an activity to
ensure that an organization is providing the best possible product or service to
customers.

Quality Control.
• Quality control popularly abbreviated as QC. It is used to ensure quality in a product
or a service. It does not deal with the processes used to create a product; rather it
examines the quality of the "end products" and the final outcome.
Quality Assurance (QA) Quality Control (QC)

 It is a procedure that focuses  It is a procedure that focuses

on providing assurance that on fulfilling the quality
quality requested will be requested.
achieved
 QA aims to prevent the defect  QC aims to identify and fix
defects
 It is a method to manage the  It is a method to verify the
quality- Verification quality-Validation
 It does not involve executing  It always involves executing a
the program program
 It's a Preventive technique  It's a Corrective technique

 It's a Proactive measure  It's a Reactive measure

  It is the procedure to create the  It is the procedure to verify
deliverables that deliverables
 QA involves in full software  QC involves in full software testing
development life cycle life cycle

 In order to meet the customer  QC confirms that the standards are

requirements, QA defines standards followed while working on the
and methodologies product

 It is performed before Quality  It is performed only after QA

Control activity is done

 It is a Low-Level Activity, it can  It is a High-Level Activity, it can

identify an error and mistakes which identify an error that QA cannot
QC cannot

 Its main motive is to prevent defects • Its main motive is to identify defects
in the system. It is a less time- or bugs in the system. It is a more
consuming activity time-consuming activity

 QA ensures that everything is  QC ensures that whatever we have

executed in the right way, and that is done is as per the requirement, and
why it falls under verification that is why it falls under validation
activity activity

 It requires the involvement of the  It requires the involvement of the

whole team Testing team

 The statistical technique applied on  The statistical technique applied to

QA is known as SPC or Statistical QC is known as SQC or Statistical
Process Control (SPC) Quality Control

Total Quality Control (TQC):

TQC stresses the importance of preventive action by determining the error source and causes
to reduce deviations from the intended design processes.
Quality circles (team of workers) are evolved to look after companywide quality assurance
programs
Total Quality Management (TQM)
• Total Quality Management (TQM) helps for significantly cut cost of operations.
• To reduce cost, it helps you reduce waste.
• It also cuts down on defect.
• This doesn't just help save money, but also reduces the time and personnel needed to
correct these errors.
Advantages of TQM:
• (i) Sharpens Competitive Edge of the Enterprise:
• TQM helps an organization to reduce costs through elimination of waste, rework etc.
It increases profitability and competitiveness of the enterprise; and helps to sharpen
the organization's competitive edge, in the globalized economy of today.
• (ii) Excellent Customer Satisfaction:

• By focusing on customer requirements, TQM makes for excellent customer

satisfaction. This leads to more and more sales, and excellent relations with
customers.
• iii) Improvement in Organizational Performance:

• Through promoting quality culture in the organization, TQM lead to improvements in

managerial and operative personnel’s performance.
• (iv) Good Public Image of the Enterprise:

• TQM helps to build an image of the enterprise in the minds of people in society. This
is due to stress on total quality system and customers’ requirements, under the
philosophy of TQM.
• (v) Better Personnel Relations:TQM aims at promoting mutual trust and openness
among employees, at all levels in the organization. This leads to better personnel
relations in the enterprise.

Limitations of TQM:

• (i) Waiting for a Long Time:

• TQM requires significant change in organization; consisting of:
• 1. Change in methods, processes etc. of organization.
• 2. Change in attitude, behavior etc. of people
• Launching of TQM and acceptance of the philosophy of TQM requires a long waiting
for the organization. It is not possible to accept and implement TQM overnight.
• (ii) Problem of Labour Management Relations:
• Success of TQM depends on the relationships between labor and management;
because participation of people at all levels is a pre-requisite for TQM program
implementation. In many organizations, here and abroad, labor-management relations
are quite tense. As such, launching, acceptance and implementation of TQM program
is nothing more than a dream for such organizations.