Quality management (QM) ensures that an organization, product, or service consistently performs as intended. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control, and quality improvement. Customers recognize that quality is an important attribute when choosing and purchasing products and services. Suppliers can recognize that quality is an important differentiator of their offerings, and endeavor to compete on the quality of their products and the service they offer. Thus, quality management is focused both on product and service quality.
History In earlier periods, arts and crafts were led by master craftspeople or artists who supervised studios, trained apprentices, and oversaw the product development process. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, steam engines, and mass production, the role of craftspeople diminished. The new approach enabled mass production of the same commodity in less time span.
The first proponent in the United States for this approach was Eli Whitney, who proposed interchangeable parts manufacture for muskets, hence producing identical components and creating a musket assembly line. The next step forward was promoted by several people, including Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and part of his approach laid a further foundation for quality management, including aspects like standardization and adopting improved practices. Henry Ford was also important in bringing process and quality management practices into operation in his assembly lines. In Germany, Karl Benz was pursuing similar assembly and production practices, although real mass production was only properly initiated by Volkswagen after World War II. Ever since, the focus of North American companies were predominantly on production against lower cost with increased efficiency.
Walter A. Shewhart made a major step in the evolution towards quality management by creating a method for quality control for production, using statistical methods, first proposed in 1924. This became the foundation for his ongoing work on statistical quality control. W. Edwards Deming later applied statistical quality control methods in the United States during World War II, thereby successfully improving quality in the manufacture of munitions and other strategically important products.
Quality leadership from a national perspective has changed over the past decades. After World War II, Japan decided to make quality improvement a national imperative as part of rebuilding their economy, and sought the help of Shewhart, Deming, and Juran, among others. W. Edwards Deming championed Shewhart's ideas in Japan from 1950 onwards. He is probably best known for his management philosophy establishing quality, productivity, and competitive position. He formulated 14 points of attention for managers, which are a high-level abstraction of many of his insights. These 14 points include key concepts such as: Break down barriers between departments. Management should learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership. Supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement. Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
Initially, Japanese goods were perceived as being of inferior quality and associated with affordability, a perception that persisted throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, subsequent efforts to enhance quality ultimately yielded positive results, with Japan subsequently achieving a high standard of quality in its manufactured products by the 1970s. For example, Japanese cars regularly top the J.D. Power customer satisfaction ratings. In the 1980s, Deming was asked by Ford Motor Company to start a quality initiative after they realized that they were falling behind Japanese manufacturers. A number of highly successful quality initiatives have been invented by the Japanese (see for example on these pages: Genichi Taguchi, QFD, Toyota Production System). Many of the methods provide techniques and have associated quality culture (i.e. people factors). These methods are now adopted by the same Western countries that decades earlier derided Japanese methods.
David A. Garvin's 1987 article in the Harvard Business Review, "Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality", noted that few companies had learned to "compete on quality", but in the past two decades, the extent of such quality differentiation, or the "quality gap", has been greatly reduced between competitive products and services. This is partly due to the contracting (also called outsourcing) of manufacturing to countries like China and India, as well internationalization of trade and competition. These countries, among many others, have raised their standards of quality to meet international standards and customer demands. The ISO 9000 series of standards are probably the best known international standards for quality management.
Some themes have become more significant, including quality culture, the importance of knowledge management, and the role of leadership in promoting and achieving high quality. Disciplines like systems thinking are introducing more holistic approaches to quality ensuring that people, processes, and products are considered together rather than as independent factors in quality management.
Government agencies and industrial organizations that regulate products have recognized that quality culture may assist companies that produce those products. A survey of more than 60 multinational companies found that those companies whose employees rated as having a low-quality culture had increased costs of $67 million/year for every 5000 employees compared to those rated as having a strong-quality culture.
The influence of quality management has spread to applications outside of manufacturing, extending into service sectors and into areas such as sales, marketing and customer service. Statistical evidence collected in the banking sector shows a strong correlation between quality culture and competitive advantage.
Customer satisfaction has long been the cornerstone of quality management and remains a key priority. However, there is an expansion of the research focus from a sole customer focus towards a stakeholder focus. This is following the development of stakeholder theory. A further development of quality management is the exploration of synergies between quality management and sustainable development.
Principles The International Standard for Quality Management (ISO 9001:2015) adopts seven management principles that can be used by top management to guide their organizations towards improved performance.
Customer focus The primary focus of quality management is to meet customer requirement and to strive to exceed customer expectations.
Rationale
Sustained success is achieved when an organization attracts and retains the confidence of customers and other interested parties on whom it depends. Every aspect of customer interaction provides an opportunity to create more value for the customer. Understanding current and future needs of customers and other interested parties contributes to the sustained success of an organization. As customers become more discerning, they seek companies that fulfill their needs and exceed their expectations. Consequently, Quality Management (QM) plays a significant role in shaping company performance and satisfaction among customers and other stakeholders.
Leadership Leaders at all levels establish unity of purpose and direction and create conditions in which people are engaged in achieving the organization's quality objectives.
Leadership has to take up the necessary changes required for quality improvement and encourage a sense of quality throughout the organization.
Rationale
The creation of unity of purpose and direction and engagement of people enable an organization to align its strategies, policies, processes, and resources to achieve its objectives.
Engagement of people Competent, empowered, and engaged people at all levels throughout the organization are essential to enhance its capability to create and deliver value.
Rationale
To manage an organization effectively and efficiently, it is important to involve all people at all levels and to respect them as individuals. Recognition, empowerment, and enhancement of competence facilitate the engagement of people in achieving the organization's quality objectives.
Process approach Consistent and predictable results are achieved more effectively and efficiently when activities are understood and managed as interrelated processes that function as a coherent system.
Rationale
The quality management system consists of interrelated processes. Understanding how results are produced by this system enables an organization to optimize the system and its performance.
Improvement Successful organizations have an ongoing focus on improvement.
Rationale
Improvement is essential for an organization to maintain current levels of performance, to react to changes in its internal and external conditions, and to create new opportunities.
Evidence-based decision-making
Decisions based on the analysis and evaluation of data and information are more likely to produce desired results.
Rationale
Decision-making can be a complex process, and it always involves some uncertainty. It often involves multiple types and sources of inputs, as well as their interpretation, which can be subjective. It is important to understand cause-and-effect relationships and potential unintended consequences. Facts, evidence and data analysis lead to greater objectivity and confidence in decision-making.
Relationship management
For sustained success, an organization manages its relationships with interested parties, such as suppliers, and retailers.
Rationale
Interested parties influence the performance of an organization and industry. Sustained success is more likely to be achieved when the organization manages relationships with all of its interested parties to optimize their impact on its performance. Relationship management with its supplier and partner networks is of particular importance.
Criticism The social scientist Bettina Warzecha (2017) describes the central concepts of Quality Management (QM), such as e.g. process orientation, controllability, and zero defects as modern myths. She alleges that zero-error processes and the associated illusion of controllability involve the epistemological problem of self-referentiality. The emphasis on the processes in QM also ignores the artificiality and thus arbitrariness of the difference between structure and process. Above all, the complexity of management cannot be reduced to standardized (mathematical) procedures. According to her, the risks and negative side effects of QM are usually greater than the benefits (see also brand eins, 2010).
Approaches
There are many methods for quality improvement. Such methods deal with the improvement of products, processes as well as other people-based improvements. ISO 9004 — guidelines for performance improvement. ISO 9001 — a certified quality management system (QMS) for organizations that want to prove their ability to consistently provide products and services that meet the needs of their customers and other relevant stakeholders. ISO 15504-4: 2005 — information technology – process assessment Part 4: Guidance on use for process improvement and process capability determination. QFD — quality function deployment, also known as the house of quality approach. Kaizen — 改善, Japanese for change for the better; the common English term is continuous improvement.