Quality gurus

W. Edward Deming

William Edwards Deming was born in Sioux City (Iowa), a small town in the Middle West. His senior year’s mathematics teacher at high school encouraged him to go to university, in spite of his parents’ slender resources. Eventually he received a PhD in 1928 at the Yale university, in the field of Theoretical Physics. In 1939, Deming joined the Bureau of the Census in Washington. His knowledge of Statistics was helpful in the development of a new kind of survey, based on sampling. The statistical techniques of the Census were adopted worldwide. In 1946 he retired from the Administration and became consultant in Statistical Studies and Professor of Statistics at New York University.

In 1947, Deming was sent to Tokyo as advisor to Allied Forces Headquarters on the application of his sampling techniques. His stay gave him the opportunity of meeting some Japanese managers who had good relations with the Keidanren, the large employer’s union. They were interested in his management theories which they heard about before the war. They invited him to give lectures and seminars in Japan. Having learnt from his experience in Stanford, he accepted under the condition that general managers attend his lectures. The first lecture was held in July 1950. The Japanese industry adopted the Deming management theories immediately and ten years later Japanese products started to flood into America. The American consumers made no mistake: they were better and cheaper. It’s a turning point in world history.

The Deming’s teaching deals with management, not only with quality. Contrary to a generally accepted idea, his goal was not to improve the present style of management by adding a new component, but to transform management practices from top to bottom. The primitive meaning of the verb “manage” is “put a house in order and let the occupants live together in harmony”. In a company, according to Deming, managing means having the processes under control, coordinating the operations and preparing the future. He said that management does not concern only production and service companies but also public administration and education. Since his first seminars in Japan, many universities have been teaching management as a science. The Deming Prize is the highest award that a company can obtain for its excellence in management.

Joseph M. Juran

Born in Romania in 1904, Juran immigrated to the United States when he was eight. His family settled in Minneapolis, Minn. Juran did well in math in school and became an expert chess player. After high school graduation, he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He worked at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, eventually moving into Bell Lab’s statistic-driven quality control department. His job involved working with a team that tested quality improvement innovations. This early work essentially set the course of his life. In the 1930s, he rose to the position of chief of industrial engineering. He also earned a law degree from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, but never practiced. During World War II, Juran worked for the government’s Lend-Lease Administration, focused on streamlining shipment processes.

Juran is best known as “the father of modern quality management”, and the publication of his book “Quality Control Handbook” for first time in 1951. He emphasized managerial approach to similar analogy for better quality results by three basic processes or “Juran’s Trilogy”; Quality planning, Quality control and Quality improvement, that make a successful framework for TQM to obtain quality goals, and improving quality.

Juran viewed TQM as “fitness for use” or fitness for customer. On the other hand, he believed like Deming that customer has to define quality, if the company wants to be successful, it should use proper indicators to determine the needs of customers accurately.

He introduced “Ten Steps to Quality Improvement” for improving the satisfaction of customer.

Philip B. Crosby

Philip Crosby (1926-2001) was an influential author, consultant and philosopher who developed practical concepts to define and communicate quality and quality improvement practices. His influence was extensive and global. He wrote the best-seller Quality is free in 1979, at a time when the quality movement was a rising, innovative force in business and manufacturing. In the 1980s his consultancy company was advising 40% of the Fortune 500 companies on quality management.

Crosby was born in West Virginia in 1926. A graduate of Western Reserve University, he saw service in the navy during World War II and again during the Korean War, in-between he completed a degree at Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine. He started his working life on the assembly line in 1952 at Crosley Corporation, later moving on to Bendix Corporation in 1955. After two years he left to become a senior quality engineer for The Martins Company in Florida; it was there where he developed and first implemented the Zero Defects concept. After working his way up, in 1965 Crosby became Corporate Vice-President and Director of Quality at ITT Corporation for 14 years.

As a result of the interest shown in Quality is free, he left ITT Corporation to set up his consultancy company, Philip Crosby Associates Incorporated, and started to teach organisations quality principles and practice as laid down in his book. In 1985 his company was floated for $30 million. In 1991 he retired from Philip Crosby Associates to launch Career IV Inc, a consultancy advising on the development of senior executives.

Quality, Crosby emphasised, is neither intangible nor immeasurable. The emphasis, for Crosby, is on prevention, not inspection and cure. The goal is to meet requirements on time, first time and every time. He believes that the prime responsibility for poor quality lies with management, and that management sets the tone for the quality initiative from the top.

The major contribution made by Crosby is indicated by the fact that his phrases ‘zero defects’, ‘getting it right first time’, and ‘conformance to requirements’ have now entered not only the vocabulary of quality itself, but also the general vocabulary of management.

Kaoru Ishikawa

Kaoru Ishikawa (July 13, 1915 – April 16, 1989) was a Japanese organizational theorist, Professor at the Faculty of Engineering at The University of Tokyo and chemical engineer. He was born in Tokyo, Japan. He belonged to a family dedicated to the industry. He studied in 1939 at the prestigious University of Tokyo, where he received the title of a chemical engineer. At the end of his career, he entered the world of industry and then approached the military world.

He is considered as the father of the scientific analysis of the causes of problems in industrial processes. Ishikawa defines quality control as a method that consists in developing, designing, elaborating and maintaining a quality product that is economical, useful and always satisfactory for the consumer. The Ishikawa Diagram was also nicknamed: fishbone diagram and had a big impact. Many companies that began to implement it improved their profitability and some overcame deep structural and financial problems.

Another of his great contributions was the circle of quality, practice or technique used in the management of organizations that allow a team from any area of ​​the company to find solutions to problems detected in their respective dependencies, or also to improve some aspect that characterizes their job. From this moment on, the worker’s conception changed in relation to the company and vice versa, because the worker was empowered and responsible, because they could be promoters of the improvement of the company’s operations, who could contribute to improve quality, also increase productivity. His main ideas were expressed in his most important book called “What is total quality control ?: the Japanese modality.” In this text, he states that Total Quality Control in Japan must impact all the members of the company, from the higher positions to the lower, all have power, in different ways, to boost the company.

Walter A Shewhart

Shewhart was concerned that statistical theory serves the needs of industry. He exhibited the restlessness of one looking for a better way. A man of science who patiently developed and tested his ideas and the ideas of others, he was an astute observer of developments in the world of science and technology. While the literature of the day discussed the stochastic nature of both biological and technical systems and spoke of the possibility of applying statistical methodology to these systems, Shewhart showed how it was to be done; in that respect, the field of quality control can claim a genuine pioneer in Shewhart. His monumental work, Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product, published in 1931, is regarded as a complete and thorough exposition of the basic principles of quality control.

A strong background in the sciences and engineering prepared Shewhart for a life of accomplishments. He graduated from the University of Illinois with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and he received a doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1917. He taught at the universities of Illinois and California, and he briefly headed the physics department at the Wisconsin Normal School in LaCrosse.

Most of Shewhart’s professional career was spent as an engineer at Western Electric from 1918 to 1924, and at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he served in several capacities as a member of the technical staff from 1925 until his retirement in 1956. He also lectured on quality control and applied statistics at the University of London, Stevens Institute of Technology, the graduate school of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and in India. He was a member of the visiting committee at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, an honorary professor at Rutgers, and a member of the advisory committee of the Princeton mathematics department.