Quality Management

History of Quality Management Systems

Quality issues have been of great concern throughout the recorded history of human beings. During the New Stone Age, several civilizations emerged, and some 40005000 ago, considerable skills in construction had been acquired. The pyramids in Egypt were built approximately during 25892566 BC. The king of Babylonia (17921750 BCE) had codified the law, and according to which, during the Mesopotamian era, builders were responsible for maintaining the quality of buildings and were given the death penalty if any of their constructed buildings collapsed and its occupants were killed.

The Industrial Revolution began in Europe in the mideighteenth century and gave birth to factories. The goals of the factories were to increase productivity and reduce costs. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, items were produced by individual craftsman for individual customers, and it was possible for workers to control the quality of their own products. In this system, large groups of workmen performed a similar type of work, and each group worked under the supervision of a foreman who also took on the responsibility to control the quality of the work performed. Quality in the factory system was ensured through skilled workers, and the quality audit was done by inspectors. The broad economic result of the factory system was mass production at low cost.

In the late nineteenth century, Fredrick Taylor's system of Scientific Management was born. Taylor's goal was to increase production. He achieved this by assigning planning to specialized engineers, and the execution of the job was left to the supervisors and workers. Taylor's emphasis on increasing production had a negative effect on quality. With this change in the production method, inspection of finished goods became the norm rather than inspection at every stage. To remedy the quality decline, factory managers created inspection departments having their own functional bosses. These departments were known as quality control departments

During World War I, the manufacturing process became more complex. Production quality was the responsibility of quality control departments. The introduction of mass production and piecework created quality problems, as workmen were interested in increasing their earnings by producing more, which in turn led to bad workmanship. This led factories to introduce fulltime quality inspectors, which marked the real beginning of inspection quality control and thus the beginning of quality control departments headed by superintendents.

Walter Shewhart introduced statistical quality control in processes. His concept was that quality is not relevant for the finished product, but for the process that created the product. Shewhart's approach to quality was based on continuous monitoring of process variation. The statistical quality control concept freed the manufacturer from a timeconsuming 100% quality control system because it accepted that variation is tolerable up to certain control limits. Thus, quality control focus shifted from the end of the line to the process. The systematic approach to quality in industrial manufacturing started during the 1930s when the cost of scrap and rework attracted attention.

From the early 1950s to the late 1960s, quality control evolved into quality assurance, with its emphasis on problem avoidance rather than problem detection. The quality assurance perspective suffered from a number of shortcomings as its focus was internal. Quality assurance was generally limited to those activities that were directly under the control of the organization. Important activities such as transportation, storage, installation, and service were typically either ignored or given little attention. The quality assurance concept pays little or no attention to the competition's offerings. This resulted in

integration of the quality actions on a companywide scale and applic

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