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Unit 6: Quality Assurance and Control

9. Break down barriers between departments (here comes the concept of “internal customer” Notes
which is found in TQM; a department is a supplier for next one. The second one is the client
for the first one),

10. Eliminate slogans (usually, it’s not the employee who did it wrong, but it’s the system
who allowed that. No need to create tension on worker, as long as the system fails to
prevent problems),
11. Eliminate management by objectives (as long as workers had to achieve an established
production level, quality will be a secondary target),
12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship (bringing problems all the time to worker’s
ears, will create a discomfort for them. Lower satisfaction of workers equals a lower
interest for doing good items),
13. Institute education and self improvement (education is an asset. Everyone has to improve
themselves),
14. Transformation is everyone’s job (improvements exists at every level).
The most important book he wrote among other is Out of the Crisis in 1987. What is relevant to
this book along these 14 principles is that he initiated the movement toward Total Quality
Management, even he didn’t used this expression? Nowadays, there exists Deming Prize,
introduced by JUSE (Japanese Union of Scientists Engineers); this prize is awarded annually for
best proponent of TQM.

Dr. Genichi Taguchi (Born in 1924)

Raised in textile town of Takamachi, Japan, Taguchi studied textile engineering.
WW II found him in Astronomical Department of navigation Institute. After several years in
Ministry of Public health and Welfare of Japan, where he met Matosaburo Masuyama, a statistician
who supported him, he was hired at Electrical Communication Laboratory, a rival of Bell
Laboratories. Here, Taguchi worked to find ways of improving quality and reliability. Taguchi
collaborated with Shewhart and Fisher.
Taguchi’s contribution to quality consists in what is called Taguchi Loss Functions, also design
of experiment to product design. His estimation was that 80% of all defective items are caused
by poor design. Therefore, emphasis should be on design stage. Design of experiment is an
engineering approach which is based on developing robust design; this is a design which results
in a product which can perform over a wide range of conditions. In other words, it’s easier to
design a product which would operate under a large range of conditions, than to control these
conditions so that the product to work as intended.
Loss function has implication to quality costs. Traditionally, if a product characteristic falls
outside specification limits, it will increase the cost of poor quality. However, if that characteristic
is closer to specifications and not to intended target, the quality of that product is poorer, even
if it stills satisfy the requirements. This may lead to lower customer satisfaction. Taguchi proposed
that as conformance values moves away from the target, loss increases as a quadratic function.
This means that smaller differences from the target result in smaller costs.

6.16 Quality Circles

In manufacturing, the Japanese practice is that the responsibility for quality rests with the
manufacturer of the part rather than “the quality deptt. acting as a staff function i.e. here the
responsibility is of the production deptt itself”. The workers are organised into teams (3 to 25
members per team) who themselves take the decision on solutions to quality problems.

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