Philip Crosby:

 The Four Absolutes of Quality Management:

•  Quality is conformance to requirements
• Quality prevention is preferable to quality inspection
• Zero defects are the quality performance standard
• Quality is measured in monetary terms – the price of non-conformance

14 Steps to Quality Improvement:

1. Management is committed to quality – and this is clear to all
2. Create quality improvement teams – with (senior) representatives from all departments.
3. Measure processes to determine current and potential quality issues.
4. Calculate the cost of (poor) quality
5. Raise quality awareness of all employees
6. Take action to correct quality issues
7. Monitor progress of quality improvement – establish a zero defects committee.
8. Train employees in quality improvement
9. Hold “zero defects” days
10. Encourage employees to create their own quality improvement goals
11. Encourage employee communication with management about obstacles to quality
12. Recognize participants’ effort
13. Create quality councils
14. Do it all over again – quality improvement does not end

Dr. Edwards Deming

Deming’s Fourteen Obligations of Top Management

1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service. Allocate resources to provide for long-range needs rather than only short term profitability
2. Adopt the new philosophy. We can no longer live with commonly accepted levels of delays, mistakes, defective materials, and defective workmanship.
3. Cease dependency on mass inspection to achieve quality. Quality is achieved by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag alone. The aim is to minimize total cost, not merely initial cost. Establish long-term relationships with suppliers to develop loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production, and service. It is management’s job to work continually on improving the total system.
6. Institute training on the job for all, including management, to make better use of every employee. New skills are required to keep up with changes in products and processes.
7. Adopt and institute leadership aimed at helping people do a better job. Management must ensure that immediate action was taken on issues that are detrimental to quality.
8. Drive out fear so that everybody may work effectively and more productively for the company.
9. Break down barriers between departments and staff areas. Everyone must work together to tackle problems that may be encountered with products or services.
10. Eliminate slogans and exhortations for the workforce as they create adversarial relationships. Also, the bulk of the causes of low quality & productivity belong to the system and lie beyond the power of the workforce.
11. Eliminate arbitrary numerical targets for the workforce and management. Substitute aids and helpful leadership in order to achieve continual improvement.
12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride in workmanship. This includes the annual appraisal of performance and Management by Objective.
13. Encourage education. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone
14. Clearly define top management’s permanent commitment to ever-improving quality and productivity. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. Support is not enough, action is required.

 Dr. Armand Feigenbaum

• Developed Total Quality Control (TQC) philosophy
• Quote: “Quality is everybody’s job, but because it is everybody’s job, it can become nobody’s job without the proper leadership and organization.”

Steps to quality:

• Quality leadership
• Modern quality technology
• Organizational commitment

Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa

• Known as the father of Japanese quality control effort
• Established concept of Company-Wide Quality Control (CWQC) – participation from the top to the bottom of an organization and from the start to the finish of the product life cycle
• Started Quality Circles – bottom-up approach – members from within the department and solve problems on a continuous basis
• The fishbone diagram is also called the Ishikawa diagram in his honor
• Introduced concept that the next process is your customer

Dr. Joseph Juran

Juran’s Quality Trilogy (compared to financial management):

• Quality planning (financial budgeting) – create a process that will enable one to meet the desired goals
• Quality control (cost control) – monitor and adjust the process
• Quality improvement (profit improvement) – move the process to a better and improved state of control through projects

Key points of Juran’s approach to quality improvement:

• Create awareness of the need for quality improvement
• Make quality improvement everyone’s job
• Create infrastructure for quality improvement
• Train the organization in quality improvement techniques
• Review progress towards quality improvement regularly
• Recognize winning teams
• Institutionalize quality improvement by including quality
• Concentration on both external and internal customers

Dr. Walter Shewhart

•  Shewhart’s control charts are widely used to monitor processes. Problems are framed in terms of special cause (assignable cause) and common cause (chance-cause).
• The Shewhart Cycle – PDCA Problem Solving Process:
• Plan – what changes are desirable? What data is needed?
• Do – carry out the change or test decided upon
• Check – observe the effects of the change or the test
• Act – what we learned from the change should lead to improvement or activity
• Referred to as the “Father of Statistical Quality Control”

Dr. Genichi Taguchi

• The lack of quality should be measured as a function of deviation from the nominal value of the quality characteristic. Thus, quality is best achieved by minimizing the deviation from the target (minimizing variation).
• Quality should be designed into the product and not inspected into it. The product should be so designed that it is immune to causes of variation.

Taguchi recommends a three-stage design process:

System Design (Stage 1):

• development of a basic functional prototype design
• determination of materials, parts, and assembly system
• determination of the manufacturing process involved

Parameter Design (Stage 2):

• selecting the nominals of the system by running statistically planned experiments (DFSS/DOE)

Tolerance Design (Stage 3):

• deals with tightening tolerances and upgrading materials