ISO 9000 and Quality Gurus

You may wonder what's behind ISO 9000? Who are those guys who established principles, incorporated in ISO 9000. First of all, let's see who are these guys who contributed to quality. They are: Walter Shewhart, Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Genichi Taguchi, Armand Feigenbaum, Kaoru Ishikawa, and Philip Crosby.

Walter A. Shewhart (1891 – 1967)

Born in Illinois, USA, Shewhart graduated University of Illinois and then he obtained the doctorate in physics at University of California in 1917. Working at Western Electric Company as an engineer, he was able to make a serious contribution to a major problem: reliability of the equipment buried underground. Control charts created by him were use to differentiate between assignable sources of variation and pure chances of variation. Shewhart studied randomness and recognized variability which exists in all manufacturing processes. In his opinion, reducing variability is equivalent to quality improvement. Later Shewhart worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories until his retirement in 1956. He wrote several articles and books, most representative being Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product in 1931, Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control in 1939. On more thing about Shewhart: he is considered to be the grandfather of quality control.

W. Edwards Deming (1900 – 1993)

Known as the father of quality, Deming was a statistics professor at New York University during the 40s. He studied for several years with Walter Shewhart; this was the base of his contribution to quality. After World War II, Deming was involved in assisting Japanese companies to reborn from their own ashes. His contribution was in improving quality, by setting a 14 points principles which should be the foundation for achieving quality improvements. Japanese companies applied extensively these principles; today's power of Japan and quality of their products has a strong root in this matter. Deming emphasized on the role of management in achieving quality. He noted that around 15% of poor quality was because of workers, and the rest of 85% was due to bad management, improper systems and processes. In his opinion, managers should involve employees in solving the problems, not simply to blame them for poor quality. Deming's 14 principles are:

• create constancy of purpose (short term reactions has to be replaced by long-term planning),
• adopt the new philosophy (management should adopt his philosophy, rather than to expect the employees to do that),
• cease dependence on inspection (it concerns to variation – in other words, if there is no variation, no inspection is needed because all products shows no defects),
• move towards a single supplier for any one item (working with several suppliers, automatically involves variation in raw materials),
• improve constantly and forever (it refers to decreasing variation, as a key to better quality),
• institute training on the job (another source of variation is the lack of training of workers; train them properly to do a certain job, and they will do it with far less variation),
• institute leadership (distinction between leadership and supervising),
• drive out fear (eliminate fear at worker's level to get their support for improvements. Fear is counter productive),
• break down barriers between departments (here comes the concept of "internal customer" which is found in TQM; a department is a supplier for next one. The second one is the client for the first one),
• 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),
• eliminate management by objectives (as long as workers had to achieve an established production level, quality will be a secondary target),
• 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),
• institute education and self – improvement (education is an asset. Everyone has to improve themselves),
• 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.

Joseph M. Juran (born in 1904)

Architect of Quality: The Autobiography of Joseph M. Juran (McGraw-Hill, 2003)... "Juran, now 99 years old, begins his tale with his humble beginnings as a Romanian peasant and his family’s immigration to the United States. He recounts how he overcame poverty, anti-Semitism, bitterness and despair... This is a tale of how education wins over ignorance, persistence prevails over complacence and, more than anything else, how faith (in God, in family, in humanity and in the American dream) is rewarded."

The pattern for Juran’s life of hard work and dedication was set at an early age. "We grew up with no fear of long hours or hard work," he writes. "We learned to seek out opportunities and to use ingenuity to gain from them. We accepted the responsibility for building our own safety nets. By enduring the heat of the fiery furnace, we acquired a work ethic that served us the rest of our lives."

As a child, Juran endured the loss of his beloved mother, an indifferent father, bitter winters, the terror of anti-Semitism. Many residents of his native village in Romania perished in Nazi death camps - and grinding poverty. Consequently, he entered the working world bitter and socially inept, yet he was driven to succeed.

Juran’s story parallels many of the great events of the 20th century. He landed his first job at Western Electric, which was the hot growth company of the 1920s. He weathered the Great Depression, he served his adopted country during World War II by working in the Lend-Lease Administration, he helped Japan rebuild its devastated economy and he showed U.S. manufacturers how to compete successfully in the world market...

Also remarkable is the success of Juran’s siblings. They, too, overcame their humble beginnings and led successful lives. For example, his brother, Rudy, became a successful bond trader; his brother, Nat, had a successful career in Hollywood, earning an Academy Award; his sister, Minerva, earned a doctorate degree and became a college professor - no small feat for a female Romanian immigrant."

Quality Digest issued an article which can be found at here. "No one in the last hundred years has had more influence on the worldwide practice of quality in business than Dr. Joseph Juran... In Architect of Quality, Juran recounts his fascinating life story, revealing how he overcame dire poverty and childhood tragedy to make a profound impact on business and society. Juran retraces his inspiring life journey - from an impoverished, tragic childhood in a tar-papered shack to his career as the revered man who helped invent and champion quality management systems, quality tools, and teams long before they became standard practice. Architect of Quality delves deep into Juran’s motivations, sharing for the first time how the early hardships he faced and his relentless, aggressive spirit shaped his character and fueled his determination to succeed."

Juran is considered to be after Deming the most important contributor to quality management. He became well know after his book publishing Quality Control Handbook in 1951. In Japan, Juran worked with manufacturers and taught classes on quality. Even his philosophy is very similar to Deming's philosophy, there exists some differences: while Deming emphasized the need for organizational transformation, Juran believed that implementation of quality initiatives does not need dramatic changes. Juran is the author of definition for quality: fitness for use, rather than simply conformance to specifications. This way, Juran took into account the client, in terms of his needs. Quality trilogy "quality planning, quality control and quality improvement" represents another large contribution to quality. First part of trilogy is concerned with identification of customers, product requirements and override of business goals. The second part of trilogy implies the use of statistical control methods. As for the third part, Juran believe is that improvement should be continual, as well as breakthrough.

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 (see the story of Deming). 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.

Armand V. Feigenbaum

Initiator of the concept of Total Quality Control, Feigenbaum published in 1961 one of his referencing book, named Total Quality Control. An interesting aspect regarding this book is that it was wrote when he was a doctoral student at MIT. The power of his ideas were discovered by Japanese in 1950s, about the same time Juran visited Japan. Quality principles set by Feigenbaum lay down on 40 keys. He promoted the concept of a working environment where quality developments cover entire organization; every single person in organization must have a truly commitment to improve the quality. Learning from other's success story is essential.

In his book Quality Control: Principles, Practices and Administration, Feigenbaum strove to move away from the then primary concern with technical methods of quality control, to quality control as a business method. Thus he emphasized the administrative viewpoint and considered human relations as a basic issue in quality control activities. Individual methods, such as statistics or preventive maintenance, are seen as only segments of a comprehensive quality control program.

Quality control itself is defined as: "An effective system for coordinating the quality maintenance and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production at the most economical levels which allow for full customer satisfaction". He stresses that quality does not mean "best" but "best for the customer use and selling price". The word "control" in quality control represents a management tool with 4 steps: Setting quality standards, Appraising conformance to these standards, Acting when standards are exceeded and Planning for improvements in the standards.

Quality control is seen as entering into all phases of the industrial production process, from customer specification and sale through design, engineering and assembly, and ending with shipment of product to a customer who is happy with it. Effective control over the factors affecting product quality is regarded as requiring controls at all important stages of the production process. These controls or jobs of quality control can be classified as:

• New-design control,
• Incoming material control,
• Product control,
• Special process studies.

Feigenbaum argues that statistical methods are used in an overall quality control program whenever and wherever they may be useful. However such methods are only part of the overall administrative quality control system, they are not the system itself. The statistical point of view, however, is seen as having a profound effect upon Modern Quality Control at the concept level. Particularly, there is the recognition that variation in product quality must be constantly studied within batches of product, on processing equipment and between different lots of the same article by monitoring and critical quality characteristics.

Modern Quality Control is seen by Feigenbaum as stimulating and building up operator responsibility and interest in quality. The need for quality-mindedness throughout all levels is emphasized, as is the need to "sell" the program to the entire plant organization and the need for the complete support of top management. Management must recognize that it is not a temporary quality cost-reduction activity. From the human relations point of view, the quality control organization is seen as both:

• A channel for communication for product-quality information,
• A means of participation in the overall plant quality program.

Finally, Feigenbaum argues that the program should be allowed to develop gradually within a given plant or company. Feigenbaum’s preface to the third edition of Total Quality Control in 1983 emphasizes the increased importance of buyers’ perceptions of variation in quality between companies and also the variation in effectiveness between the quality programs of companies. Quality is seen as having become the single most important force leading to organizational success and company growth in national and international markets. Further, it is argued that: "Quality is in its essence a way of managing the organization" and that, like finance and marketing, quality has now become an essential element of modern management.

Against this background, Total Quality Control is seen as providing the structure and tools for managing quality so that there is a continuous emphasis throughout the organization on quality leadership:

• genuine investment in, and implementation of, modern technology for quality throughout sales,
• 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:

• Prevention costs including quality planning
• Appraisal costs including inspection
• Internal failure costs including scrap and rework
• External failure costs including warranty costs, complaints, etc.

Reductions in operating quality costs result from setting up a total quality system for two reasons:

• Lack of existing effective customer-orientated customer standards may mean current quality of products is not optimal given use,
• 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 awarded 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 took him in this direction. "I first considered how best to get grassroots workers to understand and practice Quality Control. The idea was to educate all people working at factories throughout the country but this was asking too much. Therefore I thought of educating factory foremen or on-the-spot leaders in the first place." In 1968, in his role as Chairman of the Editorial Committee of Genba-To-QC (Quality Control for the Foreman) magazine, Dr Ishikawa built upon quality control articles and exercises written by the editorial committee for the magazine, to produce a "non-sophisticated" quality analysis textbook for quality circle members. The book Guide to Quality Control was subsequently translated into English in 1971, the most recent (2nd) edition being published by the Asian Productivity Organization in 1986. Amongst other books, he subsequently published What is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way which was again translated into English (Prentice Hall, 1985).

As with the other Japanese quality gurus, such as Genichi Taguchi, Kaoru Ishikawa has paid particular attention to making technical statistical techniques used in quality attainment accessible to those in industry. At the simplest technical level, his work has emphasized good data collection and presentation, the use of Pareto Diagrams to prioritize quality improvements and Cause-and-Effect (or Ishikawa or Fishbone) Diagrams. Ishikawa sees the cause-and-effect diagram, like other tools, as a device to assist groups or quality circles in quality improvement. As such, he emphasizes open group communication as critical to the construction of the diagrams. Ishikawa diagrams are useful as systematic tools for finding, sorting out and documenting the causes of variation of quality in production and organizing mutual relationships between them. Other techniques Ishikawa has emphasized include control charts, scatter diagrams, Binomial probability paper and sampling inspection.

Turning to organizational, rather than technical contributions to quality, Ishikawa is associated with the Company-wide Quality Control movement that started in Japan in the years 1955-1960 following the visits of Deming and Juran. Under this, quality control in Japan is characterized by company-wide participation from top management to the lower-ranking employees. Further, all study statistical methods. As well as participation by the engineering, design, research and manufacturing departments, also sales, materials and clerical or management departments (such as planning, accounting, business and personnel) are involved. Quality control concepts and methods are used for problem solving in the production process, for incoming material control and new product design control, and also for analysis to help top management decide policy, to verify policy is being carried out and for solving problems in sales, personnel, labor management and in clerical departments. Quality Control Audits, internal as well as external, form part of this activity.

To quote Ishikawa: "The results of these company-wide Quality Control activities are remarkable, not only in ensuring the quality of industrial products but also in their great contribution to the company’s overall business." Thus Ishikawa sees the Company-wide Quality Control movement as implying that quality does not only mean the quality of product, but also of after sales service, quality of management, the company itself and the human being. This has the effect that:

• Product quality is improved and becomes uniform. Defects are reduced.
• Reliability of goods is improved.
• Cost is reduced.
• Quantity of production is increased, and it becomes possible to make rational production schedules.
• Wasteful work and rework are reduced.
• Technique is established and improved.
• Expenses for inspection and testing are reduced.
• Contracts between vendor and vendee are rationalized.
• The sales market is enlarged.
• Better relationships are established between departments.
• False data and reports are reduced.
• Discussions are carried out more freely and democratically.
• Meetings are operated more smoothly.
• Repairs and installation of equipment and facilities are done more rationally.
• Human relations are improved.

One major characteristic of Japanese Company-Wide Quality Control is the Quality Control Circle Movement started in 1962, with the first circle being registered with the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation. Starting in industry in Japan, these have now spread to banks and retailing, and been exported world-wide. Success in the West has not been so extensive as in Japan, however, although even there have been limitations too. The nature and role of quality circles varies between companies. In Japan a quality circle is a typically voluntary group of some 5-10 workers from the same workshop, who meet regularly and are led by a foreman, assistant foreman, work leader or one of the workers. The aims of the quality circle activities are:

• To contribute to the improvement and development of the enterprise,
• To respect human relations and build a happy workshop offering job satisfaction,
• To deploy human capabilities fully and draw out infinite potential.

These aims are broader than is consistent with a narrow definition of quality as often used in the West, and Circle activities reflect this. The members of the circle have mastered statistical quality control and related methods and all utilize them to achieve significant results in quality improvement, cost reduction, productivity and safety. The seven tools of quality control are taught to all employees:

• Pareto charts
• Cause and effects diagrams
• Stratification
• Check sheets
• Histograms
• Scatter diagrams
• Shewhart’s control charts and graphs.

All members of the circle are continuously engaged in self-and-mutual development, control and improvement whenever possible, the circles implement solutions themselves, otherwise they put strong pressure on management to introduce them. Since management is already committed to the circles, it is ready to listen or act. Circle members receive no direct financial reward for their improvements.

The Japanese experience of quality circles itself provides an insight into the problems of implementation in the West. Strangely enough, however, many companies in the West have attempted to minimize or even cover up the Japanese origins, apparently to avoid cultural rejection on antagonism to "Japanese workaholics" grounds. Even in Japan many quality circles have collapsed, usually because of management’s lack of interest or excessive intervention. However, many have worked. There are now more than 10 million circle members there. The benefits are typically seen as being minor from any one improvement introduced by a quality circle, but that added together they represent substantial improvements to the company.

Perhaps more importantly, greater worker involvement and motivation is created through:

• An atmosphere where employees are continuously looking to resolve problems,
• Greater commercial awareness
• A change of shopfloor attitude in aiming for ever increasing goals.

Quality circles have been vigorously marketed in the West as a means of improving quality. There seems to be agreement, however, that they cannot be used naively, and take careful adoption for use in Western companies. Adoptions have been various and of varying effectiveness; in some companies circles have been successful, or regarded as such, in others they have failed. Many commentators, such as Philip Crosby, have warned against the fashion for quality circles as a cure-all for poor employee motivation or inadequate quality and productivity in either white-collar areas or on the shopfloor. The senior American Quality Guru Joseph Juran, in particular, has gone further, in throwing doubts on their likely effectiveness in the West at all where few company hierarchies are permitted with executives trained in quality management.

Philip B. Crosby (1926 – 2001)

Philip Crosby is a particularly well-marketed and charismatic Quality Guru. An article in the Financial Times a few years ago described him thus: "Florida has provided him with a year-round tan. That, and his thinning golden hair and snappy dress give him the look of a sunbelt Senator rather than a man from the quality department. He does have a campaign button in his lapel. It says ZD, of course, for Zero Defects.' Financial Times 26 November 1986.

Crosby is a graduate of the Western Reserve University. After naval service in the Korean War, he held a variety of quality control jobs starting as line inspector. One early experience was as quality manager on the first Pershing missile program. He worked his way up within ITT and for fourteen years he was a Corporate Vice President and Director Quality of ITT, with world-wide responsibilities for quality.

In 1979 he published Quality is Free, which became a bestseller. In response to the interest shown in the book, he left ITT that year to set up Philip Crosby Associates Incorporated. At the Quality College established in Florida he started to teach organizations how to manage quality as advocated in his book. Crosby published his second bestseller, Quality Without Tears in 1984, and he is also the author of The Art of Getting Your Own Sweet Way. More recently he has published a group of three management books, Running Things, The Eternally Successful Organization and Leading: The Art of Becoming An Executive.

Crosby's name is perhaps best known in relation to the concepts of Do It Right First Time and Zero Defects. He considers traditional quality control, acceptable quality limits and waivers of sub-standard products to represent failure rather than assurance of success. Crosby therefore defines quality as conformance to the requirements which the company itself has established for its products based directly on its customers' needs. He believes that since most companies have organizations and systems that allow (and even encourage) deviation from what is really required, manufacturing companies spend around 20% of revenues doing things wrong and doing them over again. According to Crosby this can be 35% of operating expenses for service companies. He does not believe that workers should take prime responsibility for poor quality; the reality, he says, is that you have to get management straight. In the Crosby scheme of things, management sets the tone on quality and workers follow their example; whilst employees are involved in operational difficulties and draw them to management's attention, the initiative comes from the top. What zero defect means is not that people never make mistakes, he says, but that the company does not start out expecting them to make mistakes.

As indicated earlier, not everyone agrees with this approach to quality. As Crosby himself said: "I never received any encouragement from the quality establishment. These are ideas whose time has come. This was an idea whose time had come, but it took 20 years before people realized it." In the Crosby approach the Quality Improvement message is spread by creating a core of quality specialists within the company. There is strong emphasis on the top-down approach, since he believes, without reservation, that senior management is entirely responsible for quality. His goal is to give all staff the training and the tools of quality improvement, to apply the basis precept of Prevention Management in every area. This is aided by viewing all work as a process or series of actions conducted to produce a desired result. A process model can be used to ensure clear requirements have been defined and understood by both the supplier and the customer. He also views quality improvement as an ongoing process since the word 'program' implies a temporary situation.

Crosby's Quality Improvement Process is based upon the Four Absolutes of Quality Management:

• Quality is defined as conformance to requirements, not as 'goodness' nor 'elegance'.
• The system for causing quality is prevention, not appraisal.
• The performance standard must be Zero Defects, not "that's close enough".
• The measurement of quality is the Price of Non-conformance, not indices.

The Fourteen Steps to Quality Improvement are the way that the Quality Improvement Process is implemented in an organization. They are a management tool which evolved out of a conviction that the Absolutes should be defined, understood, and communicated in a practical manner to every member of the organization:

• Make it clear that management is committed to quality.
• Form quality improvement teams with senior representatives from each department.
• Measure processes to determine where current and potential quality problems lie.
• Evaluate the cost of quality and explain its use as a management tool.
• Raise the quality awareness and personal concern of all employees.
• Take actions to correct problems identified through previous steps.
• Establish progress monitoring for the improvement process.
• Train supervisors to actively carry out their part of the quality improvement program.
• Hold a Zero Defects Day to let everyone realize that there has been a change and to reaffirm management commitment.
• Encourage individuals to establish improvement goals for themselves and their groups.
• Encourage employees to communicate to management the obstacles they face in attaining their improvement goals.
• Recognize and appreciate those who participate.
• Establish quality councils to communicate on a regular basis.
• Do it all over again to emphasize that the quality improvement program never ends.

In his book Quality is Free, Crosby identifies additional quality-building tools, including the Quality Management Maturity Grid which enables a company to measure its present quality position. In Quality Without Tears he develops the Quality Vaccine which comprises twenty one ingredients for Executives to use to support the implementation process. As his books on leadership reflected his broadening approach to improvement, he defined five new characteristics essential to becoming an Eternally Successful Organization:

• People routinely do things right the first time.
• Change is anticipated and used to advantage.
• Growth is consistent and profitable.
• New products and services appear when needed.
• Everyone is happy to work there.