Quality Pioneers

Various pioneers emerged who helped shape quality principles and laid the foundations for six sigma. They included

Walter A. Shewhart – He is the pioneer of Modern Quality Control who, recognized the need to separate variation into assignable and un-assignable causes. He is the founder of the control chart and originator of the plan-do-check-act cycle. He was the first to successfully integrate statistics, engineering, and economics and defined quality in terms of objective and subjective quality.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming – He studied under Shewhart at Bell Laboratories and major contributions includes developing 14 points on Quality Management, a core concept on implementing total quality management, is a set of management practices to help companies increase their quality and productivity. The 14 points are

• Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services.
• Adopt the new philosophy.
• Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
• End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier.
• Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production and service.
• Institute training on the job.
• Adopt and institute leadership.
• Drive out fear.
• Break down barriers between staff areas.
• Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce.
• Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
• Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, and eliminate the annual rating or merit system.
• Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone.
• Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation.

Joseph Juran – His major contributions are directing most of his work at executives and the field of quality management and developing the “Juran Trilogy” for managing quality, as Quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement. He also enlightened the world on the concept of the “vital few, trivial many” which is the foundation of Pareto charts.

Philip Crosby – He stressed on Quality management and four absolutes of quality including

• Quality is defined by conformance to requirements.
• System for causing quality is prevention not appraisal.
• Performance standards of zero defects not close enough.
• Measurement of quality is the cost of nonconformance.

Arman Feigenbaum – He developed a systems approach to quality (all organizations must be focused on quality) by emphasizing that costs of quality may be separated into costs for prevention, appraisal, and failures (scrap, warranty, etc.)

Kaoru Ishikawa – He developed the concept of true and substitute quality characteristics as

• True characteristics are the customer’s view
• Substitute characteristics are the producer’s view
• Degree of match between true and substitute ultimately determines customer satisfaction

He also advocated of the use of the 7 tools and advanced the use of quality circles or worker quality teams. He also developed the concept of Japanese Total Quality Control

• Quality first and not short term profits.
• Next process is the customer.
• Use facts and data to make presentations.
• Respect for humanity as a management philosophy of full participation

Genichi Taguchi – He developed the quality loss function (deviation from target is a loss to society) and promoted the use of parameter design (application of Design of experiments) or robust engineering. The goal is to develop products and processes that perform on target with smallest variation insensitive to environmental conditions and the focus is on engineering the design.