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:
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