SF - 3.15.0 - Quality
The whole quality movement probably has to be referred to Walter Deming.
Following the surrender of Japan at the end of the Second World War, the allies wanted to avoid the problems that had followed the surrender of Germany following the First World War. The fact that Germany was left without assistance, and facing massive war reparations, was certainly a factor in Hitler's rise, the result being the Second World War. So the allies provided reconstruction aid to Japan following the Second World War.
Walter Deming was a worker from the US Department of Agriculture. He worked with the Japanese agriculture industry, and particularly in terms of quality control, both in terms of production, and in terms of packing, storing, and distributing of supplies of agricultural products. His success in this regard caught the attention of other areas of Japanese industry. He set up training on quality issues for other Japanese industries. Over the course of a couple of decades, of course, the quality of Japanese goods quality and reliability of Japanese goods reach such heights that they actually threatened American production. Thus, a couple of decades late, perhaps, American manufacturers and business owners started to realize that they, too, needed to pay attention to quality.
Deming's seminars for American CEOs, which were highly subscribed, didn't just cover quality, but also many issues of management. One of the points that he made was that Americans, because of their manufacturing success, thought that they knew something about management. He would point out, in the seminars, that Americans didn't know anything about management on that basis. They had been on the winning side following a major world war, and therefore, it would have been extremely hard for their businesses not to succeed.
There are a number of different approaches to the quality movement, but they all seem to lead back, at some point, to Walter Deming's ideas. There is, for example, Total Quality Management, or TQM. This relies very heavily on the PDCA, or Plan/Do/Check/Act, cycle that Deming instituted.
Six Sigma is another quality movement. Sigma is a reference to a standard deviation, on the Bell curve. The point of the Six Sigma movement is to try and improve quality to the extent that there is almost no difference within six standard deviations, and therefore the normal bell curve starts to look more like a spike.
ISO 9000 is the international standard for quality, although, as previously noted, it isn't really the international standard for quality. It is a standard and structure for discussing how important quality is to you, and what steps you are taking to ensure that your products meet standards of quality and reliability.
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