Sustainable growth of a company is not any easy task and it is a clear indicative of a company’s objective of continuous quality control. In today’s world we see that there are only a handful number of companies that stand out others with their product. Why only a few company is making billions when some are thinking about closing down a product’s life cycle or even closing their business.? The reason is not straight forward, but one of the major reason of a company’s excelling in performance is its ability to control and improve the quality of the products. This article is not about what the quality control is all about , it is about what the quality pioneers though about quality control.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming
One of the leading force of the 19th century behind the development of quality control management process. he was born in Iowa, USA in October 1900 and received a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in the same subject. His philosophy of quality control are simple and easy-to-follow. Below are some of his philosophy that I’ve explained with my own understanding of quality control.
- Identify the common and special causes that influence the quality of a product. There are some common causes that is inherent to that system and control the quality of a particular product-by ensuring that these common causes are not a threat or at least reducing the probability of occurring such threats during process of producing a product will certainly improve quality.
- Management is the key to the control of quality and they have the responsibility to create environment that is conducive to the flourish of quality of product. Only by making policy and strategy for control quality will not be effective at all, if management do not want to get their hands a little dirty by involving themselves little more intimately with their quality executives, managers and production team.
Joseph M. Juran
Originally from Romania and Emigrated to USA at the age of eight with his parents. Incidentally, like Dr Deming, he was also an Electrical Engineer. His deep insights into the quality domain had resulted in the following statements:
- By using 80-20 Principle( also known as Pareto principle) ,you can improve 80% of the quality of a product only by fixing the 20 percent of the problems. Actually, this 20 percent represents the vital problems of all the existing problems in a product production process.
- Customer always want more features and less problem. Therefore, by concentration on improving quality will serve both customer satisfaction and competitive edge.
- In quality control effort of a company, the management needs to have hands on involvement with the quality team.
Philip Crosby
He was born in June, 1926 in west Virginia, USA. Despite having medical background, he was interested in quality control issues and he joined American society for quality control. His philosophy on quality are as follows:
- Quality should focus on conformity to the requirements of the products, not on to “exceeding customer expectations”
- You have to plan for zero-defect for your product. Anything less than that should not be acceptable for the final delivery of the product.
Karou Ishikawa
One of the greatest Japanese quality professionals-born in 1015 in Japan.He graduated in Chemistry from the Tokyo University . Ishikawa’s principles of quality aspects of a product in brief:
- You should use the cause and effect diagram to make a list of all the possible causes that can effect the quality of a product.
- Quality improvement is a never-ending process that must be followed during the life-cycle of a product.
- Use of visual presentation to analyze quality of a product is important. You can sue tools like flow histogram or scatter graph to show the quality improvement curve of your product.
- Without the contribution from all the employees of an organization, the quality control may not be achieved.
