A Chronology of Quality, Part 2

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Published on Quality Digest (http://www.qualitydigest.com) Home > A Chronology of Quality, Part 2

A Chronology of Quality, Part 2

Quality in a sellers market
Matthew Barsalou

Published: 02/19/2013 Editors note: This is part two of a four-part series on the history of quality. For a description of the early years of the quality movement, see part one. For the later years, see part three. After the end of World War II, U.S. industry had become a sellers market, and the priority for manufacturers was quantity over quality. According to Andrea Gabors book, The Man Who Discovered Quality (Penguin Books, 1992), many companies discontinued the use of statistical process control, and even AT&T abandoned Shewharts control chart during the 1950s. [ad:22994] Business schools at this time also taught that increased quality was the equivalent of increased costs, and this theory together with a sellers market lowered the quality standard in U.S. industry. In 1946 Preston Wescot, who had been one of the War Production Board statistical quality control instructors, got together with George Deforest Edwards, Bell Labs director of quality assurance, and eight other men to form the American Society for Quality Control (ASQC). The new society was a merging of 17 different quality societies and originally had 253 founding members. To raise funds, the society allowed new members to pay an additional fee in order to be considered founding members. By the end of 1946, there were more than 1,000 members. The society held its first annual convention in June 1947, at which time Walter A. Shewhart, a founding member, was voted an honorary member, and the societys Shewhart Medal was created. The Buffalo Society of Quality Engineers donated the journal Industrial Quality Control to the ASQC, and the publication eventually became Quality Progress magazine. ASQC dropped the word Control from its name in 1997.

Post-war developments in quality

As U.S. quality was declining during the post-war selling frenzy, Japan was struggling to rebuild after the devastation of World War II. Although the Japanese were capable of producing high-quality war machines, the country had a reputation in the West for low-quality goods. Japan had very few natural resources and realized it needed to produce quality goods to build an export market. In early 1946 Gen. Douglas MacArthur asked a radio engineer named Homer Sarasohn to go to Japan to help rebuild the countrys war-torn radio industry. MacArthur wanted to broadcast to Japanese households, but factories had been bombed during the war and couldnt produce radio receivers, and most of their upper managers had been killed or jailed. Middle managers needed to move up and

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assume leadership responsibilities in the organizational hierarchies but lacked decision-making experience. MacArthur ordered that training be conducted to remedy this, and the surviving managers in Japan attended. Charles Protzman arrived to help Sarasohn in 1948, and together they prepared the textbook, The Principles of Industrial Management, which they used to train managers in manufacturing and mass production. The textbook contained a section on quality control, which some Americans objected to because they feared it would make Japan too much of a competitive threat. In 1950 Sarasohn invited Shewhart to teach statistical process control in Japan; however, Shewhart declined, so Sarasohn invited W. Edwards Deming. Deming introduced the Japanese to Joseph Jurans 1951 book, Quality Control Handbook (McGraw-Hill, reprint 1988). The Japanese eventually invited Juran to Japan to teach them about quality. Deming was invited to lecture on statistical quality control by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) three years after the group started working with quality control. Many people credit Juran and Deming with improving the quality of Japanese products; however, Juran believes that Japans quality revolution was the most important thing to happen after World War II, and that it would have happened even if he and Deming had not gone to Japan. During his lectures Deming went beyond just teaching statistics and explained the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) production cycle to Japanese managers. He always called this the Shewhart Cycle because it was originally thought up by Walter Shewhart, although it was attributed to Deming. PDCA is used to ensure that the customers wants and needs are considered throughout the production of a product. The four steps begin during the product design phase and are repeated throughout the products manufacturing. Gabor notes that at that time, General Motors used to design a vehicle and then rely on sales pitches and advertising to sell it. In comparison, a company using plan-do-check-act will study what customers really want and design a product that meets these needs. Using PDCA helped Japan design and build products based on customers requirements. In The New Economics (MIT Press, 2nd ed. 2000), Deming places the responsibility for quality on managements shoulders rather than workers, stressing that workers can only try to do their jobs. He counters the argument that workers need to work harder to protect their jobs by describing an efficient company with a high level of quality that nevertheless went out of business because it was producing a product that customers no longer wanted. Job security and jobs are dependent on managements foresight to design product and services that will entice customers and build a market, he says. In Quality Productivity, and Competitive Position (MIT, 1982), Deming warns that dependence on tariffs and quotas to reduce imports is temporary, and only prolongs the life of inefficiency and incompetence. Regarding U.S. management, Deming is quoted by Rafael Aguayo in Dr. Deming: The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality (Touchstone, 1991) as saying, Export anything except American management. At least not to friendly nations.

Kaoru Ishikawa and quality circles

In his book What Is Total Quality Control? (Prentice Hall, first U.S. ed. 1988), statistician and Deming Prize winner Kaoru Ishikawa explains that if quality control places an emphasis only on inspection, then only one department within a company is involved. Then: All they need to do is stand at the exit and guard it in such a way as to prevent defective products from being shipped, he says. If a quality control program emphasizes the manufacturing process, however, involvement is extended to assembly lines, to subcontractors, and to the divisions of purchasing, production engineering, and marketing. Greg Watson in his article, The Legacy of Ishikawa, refers to Ishikawa as the prime mover of quality in Japan and the father of quality circles. Ishikawa was the son of Ichiro Ishikawa, who

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was the first president of Nippon Keidanren, the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations. Kaoru Ishikawa worked as a production engineer at Nissan Liquid Fuel Co. until 1947, when he was asked to take a position as a professor at the University of Tokyo. He joined the Quality Control Research Group of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers in 1949, and he spent parts of 1950 researching quality at various companies. Ishikawa believed that PDCA was the most important part of quality improvement, and that processes needed to be controlled to control product quality. Ishikawa in What Is Total Quality Control? explains that all divisions within a company should be involved in quality control, and that this is how one meets the needs of the customer. He also says that workers and foremen must be good at what they do in order for quality control to function. However, it was not easy to educate workers and foremen in Japan during the late 1950s because there were too many of them, and they worked in factories throughout Japan. To address this problem, the Japan Broadcasting Corp. aired programs aimed at introducing quality control to workers and their supervisors. Supervisors asked for their own quality-related journal in 1962; Ishikawa worried that many supervisors would not read the journal, so he advocated quality circles, where those who read the journals could talk to those who didnt. Ishikawa states that quality circles are intended to contribute to the improvement and development of the company, respect humanity, build a happy workplace, and fully utilize human potential. Quality circles are to be organized on a voluntary basis from the bottom up and not top down, and they are a form of democratic management. There may be an improvement in working conditions because of quality circles, but these improved conditions are just a byproduct of quality circles and not their actual objective. Juran gives an example of a Japanese quality circle that he encountered in 1966. Three ladies as young as 18 years old presented the results of their quality circle at a conference. The three were production workers, and they determined which assembly mistakes occurred the most. They found and implemented solutions to the problems that they identified. For example, an operation was typically forgotten, so they had a jig made that depended upon the forgotten parts for it to function correctly. That way the assembly operation could not be finished if the parts were missing. Without any help from engineers or management, the three production workers lowered the defect rate from 2.2 percent to 0.6 percent. Juran claims that judging quality circles only in terms of reductions in the defect rate is leaving out one of their main benefits: increased morale within the workforce because of increased employee participation. According to Robinsons The QC Circles, a group of Japanese visited the United States in 1968 and explained the benefits of quality circles; however, U.S. managers were experienced in Frederick Winslow Taylors theory of scientific management, so they had low expectations of workers abilities, and quality circles got off to a slow start in America. Donald Dewar, who founded the Quality Circle Institute, which published Quality Circle Digest, the precursor to Quality Digest, was instrumental in introducing the concept to the United States. Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. studied quality circles in 1973 and launched a successful program that influenced other companies such as Harley Davidson and General Motors. Quality circles had spread to England by 1977 and Asia by 1980. Robinson gives the example of bottle inspectors in England who formed what he considered to be a successful quality circle. The inspectors main job was to check bottles for foreign contaminants, but they would be moved to other tasks when the machines broke down, which happened frequently. A quality circle studied the situation and recommended the creation of work stations for manual inspections that could be performed when the machines broke down. The benefit in cost savings were determined to be more than 400,000 per year. In 1967 Juran wondered if quality circles could function outside of Japan. The answer turned out to be yes. America had quality circles by the mid-1970s, and the companies that used them reported millions of dollars in savings. Many business magazines wrote about how successful quality circles

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were, which generated more interest in them. During the late 1970s and and early 1980s, U.S. management often blamed workers for causing poor quality, and they saw quality circles as a way to let workers fix quality problems. Many U.S. managers went to Japan to witness quality circles in action, but failed to notice that they were just one part of a bigger picture. Japanese companies that used quality circles also had engineers and managers working on quality problems and problem prevention, but the visiting U.S. managers failed to notice this. In his autobiography, Architect of Quality (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Juran observed that quality circles did produce spectacular results, but they were part of an overall system and not the single cause of quality in Japanese products. The American use of quality circles increased dramatically during the early 1980s and then quickly declined, although some circles were still going into the 1990s. The quality circles that did survive did so in a changed form.

About The Author

Matthew Barsalou
Matthew Barsalou is a quality manager with experience working in the automotive industry in Germany, Belgium, France, The Netherlands, England, and China. He is an ASQ-certified Six Sigma Black Belt, quality engineer, and quality technician, and a TV-certified quality manager, quality management representative, and auditor. He has a bachelor of science in industrial sciences, a master of liberal studies with emphasis in international business, and is completing a master of science in industrial engineering from the Wilhelm Bchner Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany. 2013 Quality Digest Magazine. Copyright on content held by Quality Digest or by individual authors. Contact Quality Digest for reprint information. Source URL (retrieved on 03/04/2013): http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/quality-insiderarticle/chronology-quality-part-2.html Links: [1] http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/quality-insider-column/chronology-quality-part-1.html [2] http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/quality-insider-article/chronology-quality-part-3.html [3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Who-Discovered-Quality/dp/0140165282 [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Production_Board [5] http://asq.org/qic/display-item/index.html?item=4953 [6] http://asq.org/pub/qualityprogress/past/0506/qp0506spichiger.html [7] [9] http://www.amazon.com/Jurans-Quality-Control-Handbook-Juran/dp/0070331766 [10] http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/61868/756_ftp.pdf?sequence=1 [11] http://asq.org/qic/display-item/index.html?item=12041 [12] http://asq.org/qic/display-item/index.html?item=12878 [13] http://www.amazon.com/New-Economics-Industry-Government-Education/dp/0262541165 [14] http://www.amazon.com/Quality-Productivity-Competitive-Position-Deming/dp/0911379002 [15] http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Deming-American-Japanese-Quality/dp/0671746219 [16] http://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Japanese/dp/0139524339 [17] http://asq.org/qic/display-item/index.html?item=19514 [18] http://www.keidanren.or.jp/en/profile/pro001.html [20] http://asq.org/qic/display-item/?item=5651 [22] http://www.amazon.com/Architect-Quality-J-M-Juran/dp/0071589783

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