Page 193 - DMGT501_OPERATIONS_MANAGEMENT

Unit 6: Quality Assurance and Control

Against this background, Total Quality Control is seen as providing the structure and tools for Notes
managing quality so that there is a continuous emphasis throughout the organization on quality
leadership:
1. Genuine investment in, and implementation of, modern technology for quality throughout
sales,

2. Engineering and production: and top-to-bottom human commitment to quality and
productivity.
As Feigenbaum says: “In effect, quality and its costs are managed and engineered and motivated
throughout the organization with the same thoroughness and depth with which successful
products and services are themselves managed and engineered and produced and sold and
serviced”. Such Total Quality Control programs are highly cost-effective because of their results
in improved levels of customer satisfaction, reduced operating costs, reduced operating losses
and field service costs, and improved utilization of resources. By-products such as sounder
setting of time standards for labor may also be most valuable. Thus a Total Quality System is
defined as: “The agreed company-wide and plantwide operating work structure, documented in
effective, integrated technical and managerial procedures, for guiding the coordinated actions
of the people, the machines and the information of the company and plant in the best and most
practical ways to assure customer quality satisfaction and economical costs of quality.” Operating
quality costs are divided into:
1. Prevention costs including quality planning
2. Appraisal costs including inspection

3. Internal failure costs including scrap and rework
4. External failure costs including warranty costs, complaints, etc.
Reductions in operating quality costs result from setting up a total quality system for two
reasons:
1. Lack of existing effective customer-orientated customer standards may mean current quality
of products is not optimal given use,

2. Expenditure on prevention costs can lead to a several fold reduction in internal and external
failure costs.

Kaoru Ishikawa (1915-1989)

Ishikawa was a Japanese consultant, father of the scientific analysis of causes of problems in
industrial processes. One of his greatest contributions to quality was the diagram which has his
name “Ishikawa diagram” or Fishbone Diagram.
Professor Ishikawa was born in 1915 and graduated in 1939 from the Engineering Department of
Tokyo University having majored in applied chemistry. In 1947 he was made an Assistant
Professor at the University. He obtained his Doctorate of Engineering and was promoted to
Professor in 1960. He has been a7warded the Deming Prize and the Nihon Keizai Press Prize, the
Industrial Standardization Prize for his writings on Quality Control, and the Grant Award in
1971 from the American Society for Quality Control for his education program on Quality
Control.

While, perhaps ironically, the early origins of the now famous Quality Circles can be traced to
the United States in the 1950s, Professor Ishikawa is best known as a pioneer of the Quality
Circle movement in Japan in the early 1960s, which has now been re-exported to the West. In a
speech to mark the 1000th quality circle convention in Japan in 1981, he described how his work

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