Chapter 2

The Received Wisdom on TQM

Quality management experts such as Crosby, Deming, Feigenbaum and Juran have had a
considerable influence on the development of TQM throughout the world and their views and
teachings are summarized in this chapter. The Japanese have had a profound influence on the
understanding and development of TQM. Therefore, no book on TQM would be complete
without some discussion of the way in which Japanese companies develop and manage the
concept. The views of the four influential Japanese experts (Imai, Ishikawa, Shingo and
Taguchi) are explored and summarized.

Crosby (1926–2001)
Philip B. Crosby’s audience was primarily top management: he sold his approach to them and
stressed increasing profitability through quality improvement. His 38 Managing Quality argument
was that higher quality reduces costs and raises profits. He defined quality as ‘conformance to
requirements’, not as ‘goodness’.
CROSBY’S 14-STEP QUALITY IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMME
1.Management commitment
2.Quality improvement team
3.Quality measurement
4.Cost of quality evaluation
5.Quality awareness
6.Corrective action
7.Establish an ad hoc committee for the zero defects programme
8.Supervisor training
9.Zero defects day
10.Goal-setting
11.Error cause removal
12.Recognition
13.Quality councils
14.Do it over again

Deming (1900–1993)
Deming’s view was that quality management and improvement are the responsibility of all the
firm’s employees: top management must adopt the ‘new religion’ of quality, lead the drive for
improvement and be involved in all stages of the process. Hourly workers should be trained and
encouraged to prevent defects and improve quality and be given challenging and rewarding
jobs. Quality professionals should educate other managers in statistical techniques and
concentrate on improving the methods of defect prevention. Finally, statisticians should consult
with all areas of the company.
DEMING’S 14 POINTS FOR MANAGEMENT
1. Create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service, with the aim to
become competitive, stay in business, and to provide jobs.
2. Adopt the new philosophy – we are in a new economic age. Western management must
awaken to the challenge, learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for future change.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a
mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business based on price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move
towards a single supplier for any one item on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and
productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership (see point 12): the aim of supervision should be to help people, machines,
and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management, as well as supervision of
production workers, needs overhaul.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales and production
must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and problems in use that may be
encountered with the product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce that ask for zero defects and
new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of
the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the
power of the workforce.
11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor; substitute leadership instead.
11b. Eliminate management by objectives, by numbers and by numerical goals; substitute
leadership instead.
12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his or her right to pride of workmanship. The
responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of
workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating, and of
management by objectives.
13. Institute a vigorous programme of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation
is everybody’s job.
Feigenbaum (1922–2014)
Armand V. Feigenbaum was General Electric’s worldwide chief of manufacturing operations for
a decade until the late 1960s. Later, he became president of an engineering consultancy firm,
General Systems Co., which designs and installs operational systems in corporations around
the world. Feigenbaum is the originator of the term ‘total quality control’, defined in 1961 in his
first edition of Total Quality Control as:
 an effective system for integrating the quality-development, quality-maintenance, and
quality-improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable marketing,
engineering, production, and service at the most economical levels which allow for full customer
satisfaction.
FEIGENBAUM’S 10 BENCHMARKS FOR TOTAL QUALITY SUCCESS
1 Quality is a company-wide process.
2 Quality is what the customer says it is.
3 Quality and cost are a sum, not a difference.
4 Quality requires both individual
and team zealotry. 5 Quality is a way
of managing. 6
Quality and innovation are mutually dependent.
7 Quality is an ethic.
8 Quality requires continuous improvement.
9 Quality is the most cost-effective, least capital-intensive route to productivity.
10 Quality is implemented with a total system connected with customers
and suppliers.
Juran (1904–2008)
Juran was the first to broaden the thinking in quality control by emphasizing the importance of
management and the need for a supportive infrastructure. The focus of his series of lectures
was that quality control must be an integral part of the management function and practised
throughout the organization. It can be argued that the teachings of Juran provided the catalyst
which resulted in the involvement of first-line supervisors and operators in the improvement
process (Juran and Godfrey 1999; Pederson, Dresdow and Benson 2013; Kamonja et al. 2014).
Part of his argument is that companies must reduce the cost of quality. This is dramatically
different from Deming. Deming ignored the cost of quality while Juran, like Crosby and
Feigenbaum, claimed that reducing it is a key objective of any business.
THE JURAN METHOD
1 Build awareness of the need and opportunity for improvement.
2 Set goals for improvement.
3 Organize to reach the goals.
4 Provide training.
5 Carry out projects to solve problems.
6 Report progress.
7 Give recognition.
8 Communicate results.
9 Keep the score.
10 Maintain momentum by making annual improvement part of the regular system and
processes of the company
Broadly speaking, the teachings of these four gurus can be characterized by the focus of their
approach, as follows
Crosby: company-wide motivation.
Deming: statistical process control.
Feigenbaum: systems management.
Juran: project management.
Imai (b. 1930)
Masaaki Imai (1986, 1997) is the person credited with bringing together the various
management philosophies, theories, techniques and tools which have assisted Japanese
companies over the last four or so decades to improve their efficiency. The published evidence
indicates that the impact of Kaizen in Japanese companies has been considerable.
Ishikawa (1915–1989)
Kaoru Ishikawa’s contribution is in three main areas: (1) the simplification and widespread use
of the seven basic quality control tools; (2) the company-wide quality movement; and (3) quality
circles. His thinking covers a number of aspects of modern-day TQM. An underlying theme
throughout Ishikawa’s work (Ishikawa 1979, 1985, 1991) was that people at all levels of the
organization should use simple methods and work together to solve problems, thereby removing
barriers to improvement, co-operation and education and developing a culture that is conducive
to continuous improvement.
He was an original member of the quality control research group of the Japanese Union of
Scientists and Engineers (JUSE). In particular, he was on the editorial staff of the JUSE
publication Gemba to QC, which, when it was launched in April 1962, called for the formation of
quality circles (Sasaki and Hutchins 2014). This is the reason why Ishikawa is regarded as the
‘father of quality control circles’. JUSE organized training programmes for shop-floor supervisors
– workshop quality control study groups – and this led to the publication of the textbook.
Subsequently, JUSE started to register the quality circles that then formed in manufacturing
organizations. From this start Ishikawa played a great role in the development of quality circles
in Japan and assisted with worldwide spread of the concept.
Shingo (1909–1990)
Shingo advocated the use of the poka-yoke system to reduce and eliminate defects. He
classified poka-yoke systems into two types: regulatory functions and setting functions. Two
main functions are performed by the regulatory devices: (1) control methods which, when
abnormalities are detected, shut down the machine thus preventing the occurrence of further
non-conformities, and (2) warning methods which signal, by means of noise and/or light
devices, the occurrence of an abnormality. There are three main types of poka-yoke setting
functions: (1) contact methods in which sensing devices detect abnormalities; (2) fixed-value
methods in which abnormalities are detected by counting devices; and (3) motion step methods
where abnormalities are detected by failure to follow a predetermined motion or routine.
Taguchi (1924–2012)
In his ideas about the loss function, Taguchi (1986) defined quality as follows: ‘The quality of a
product is the loss imparted to society from the time the product is shipped.’ Among the losses
he included consumers’ dissatisfaction, warranty costs, loss of reputation and, ultimately, loss of
market share. Taguchi maintained that a product does not start causing losses only when it is
out of specification, but when there is any deviation from the target value. Further, in most cases
the loss to society can be represented by a quadratic function (i.e. the loss increases as the
square of the deviation from the target value). This leads to the important conclusion that quality
(as defined by Taguchi) is most economically achieved by minimizing variance, rather than by
strict conformance to specification.
This conclusion provides the basis for Taguchi’s ideas for off-line quality control. Off-line quality
control means optimizing production process and product parameters in such a way as to
minimize item-to-item variations in the product and its performance. Clearly this focuses
attention on the design process. Taguchi promoted three distinct stages of designing in quality:
 System design. This involves the selection of parts and materials and the use of
feasibility studies and prototyping. In system design technical knowledge and scientific
skills are paramount.
 Parameter design. The numerical values for the system variables (product and process
parameters which are called factors) are chosen so that the system performs well, no
matter what disturbances or noises (i.e. uncontrollable variables) are encountered by it
(i.e. it is robust).
 Tolerance design. If the system is not satisfactory, tolerance design is then used to
improve performance by tightening the tolerances.
Japanese-Style Total Quality
The Japanese define their goal as continual improvement towards perfection. They allocate
responsibility for quality and its improvement among all employees. At the highest levels, the
emphasis is on breakthrough and on teamwork throughout the organization. There are a
number of now familiar concepts associated with Japanese-style TQM, or total quality control
(TQC) or company-wide quality control (CWQC) as they term it (see Mizuno 1988; Nemoto
1987).
Earlier work tried to make a distinction between TQC and CWQC, but in Japanese companies
today they appear to be one and the same. These concepts include:
Total commitment to improvement
Perfection and defect analysis
Continuous change
Taking personal responsibility for the quality assurance of one’s own processes
Insistence on compliance
Correcting one’s own errors
Adherence to disciplines

Orderliness and cleanliness.