KYAMBOGO UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF ENGINEERING

DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL AND PRODUCTION ENGINEERING

QUALITY ASSUARENCE ASSIGNEMENT 1

BY

BYEKORA BARNABUS ENDEVER

20/U/IEE/8104 /PE

YEAR THREE

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QUESTION: Write about the 4 other gurus who have contributed immensely to the quality
management. Highlight the key contributions to the advancement quality management.

1. Armand V. Feigenbaum

Armand v. Feigenbaum is an American quality control expert and businessman. He is the

founder and president of General system Company, an international engineering company that
designs and implements total quality systems; and a developer of “Total quality control”
concept.

He developed the “Total Quality Control” concept at General Electric company in New York
City. In 1951, while a doctoral student at MIT school of management, Dr. Feigenbaum wrote
the first edition of his book Total Quality Management, the approach to quality and profitability
that has profoundly influenced management strategy and productivity in the competition for
the world markets across the globe.

He wrote, “Total quality control is an effective system for integrating the quality development,
quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of various groups in an organization so
as to enable production service at the most economical levels which allow full customer
satisfaction.”

Here are Dr Feigenbaum’s elements of total quality to lead to a total customer Focus:

• Quality is the customer`s perception of what quality is, not what a company think it is.
• Quality and cost are the same, not different.
• Quality is an individual team commitment.
• Quality and innovation are interrelated and mutually beneficial.
• Managing quality is managing the business
• Quality is a principal.
• Quality is not temporary or quick fix but a continuous process of improvement.
• Productivity gained by cost-effective, demonstrably beneficial quality investment.
• Implement quality by encompassing suppliers and customers in the system.

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2. Walter Andrew Shewhart

Walter Andrew Shewhart was an American physicist engineer and statician, sometimes known
as the father of statistical quality control.

While at bell laborites, Shewhart developed a critical insight that, while all the processes
exhibit variation, some variation is inherent to the specific process. From this thinking, he
invented the statistical process control (SPC) technique in 1924. The technique has been used
across a range of industries for quality control ever since.

Shewhart Identified two categories of variation which he called” assignable-cause” and

“common-cause “variation, respectively. He devised the control chart as a tool for
distinguishing between the two. Shewhart reported that bringing a process into a state of
statistical control was needed to reduce waste and improve quality. In the preface to his book”
Economic control of quality of manufactured product” Shewhart stated: “the object of industry
is to set up economic ways of satisfying human wants and in doing to reduce everything
possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort. Through the use of scientific
method, extended to take account of modern statistical concepts, it has been possible to set up
limits within which the results of routine efforts must lie if they are to be economical.
Deviations in the results of routine process outside such limits indicate that the routine has
broken down and will no longer be economical until the cause of trouble is removed “For over
50 years clinical laboratories have embraced Shewhart’s ideas and incorporated statistical
process control into standard operating procedures for clinical laboratory Quality control and
proficiency testing.

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Shewhart cycle.

Shewhart also developed a Shewhart cycle. This learning or improvement cycle combines
management thinking with statistical analysis. The constant evaluation of management policy
and procedures leads to continuous improvement. This cycle has also been called the Deming
cycle, the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, or the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle.

The Shewhart cycle has the following four stages:

1) Plan: identify what can be improved and what change is needed

2) Do: implement the design change.
3) Study: measure and analyses the process or outcome
4) Act: if the results are not as hoped for

This cycle is used to make changes that lead to improvement in a manner of continuous quality
improvement, and this is never ending process. After the low-cost changes are made, the cycle
process is repeated for another step, task, or process in the microsystem or system. After a
period of time, other changes may result in the original process having an opportunity for
improvement again. The PDCA provides a simple and effective approach for solving problems
and managing change.

3. Kaoru Ishikawa

Kaoru Ishikawa is known as the father of Japanese quality. He played an instrumental role in
the development of the concept of the quality Circle’. Ishikawa believed that increased internal
cooperation and coordination positively affects a customer’s needs and ultimately leads to
process efficiency and better quality of products and services.

Ishikawa’s major contributions in the area of quality control and process improvement:

Fishbone Diagram (cause and Effect diagram). This tool created by Kaoru Ishikawa is
known as fishbone diagram owing to its shape. It so one of the seven basic quality control
tools. A fishbone diagram clusters the roadblocks together to identify which factors have the

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greatest impact. Ishikawa diagram is commonly used in the product design and presentation of
quality defects to reveal the factors causing the overall effect.

Implementation of quality. Basically, quality circles are formal groups of people trained by
specialists in human factors and skills of problem identification, data gathering, and analysis
and generation solution. This idea was described by Edward Deming and was later expanded
by Ishikawa.

Emphasis on internal customer: Ishikawa suggested the over-reliance on specialists would

limit the scope of improvement for all the employees. Therefore, an overall participation was
required at all the levels of the organization. Every area has the potential for contributing on
the overall quality, therefore; all areas should embed statistical techniques in the internal and
external audit programmers.

The contribution of Ishikawa stands tall and unquestioned in the area of quality control and
process improvement. The cause-and-effect diagram is used by global organizations in order
to understand the causes behind the quality gaps on the overall functioning of the organization.

4. Shigeo Shingo

Shigeo Shingo was a Japanese industrial engineer who was heavily involved in the
development and promotion of the Toyota production system to the rest of the world. He is
best known for Poka-yoke. Poka-yokes is a Japanese term that means “mistake-proofing”.

Poka-yoke is any mechanism in a lean manufacturing process that helps an equipment operator
to avoid mistakes. Its purpose is to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or
drawing attention to human errors as they occur.

Shigeo Shingo recognized three types poka-yoke for detecting and preventing errors in a
mass production system:

The contact method. The contact method identifies product defects by testing the product’s
shape size, color, or other physical attributes.

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The fixed-value method. The fixed-value method alerts the operator if a certain number of
movements are not made.

The motion-step method. The motion step method determines whether the prescribed steps
of reprocess have been followed.

Shigeo Shingo also developed a single-minute exchange of die (SMED). This is one of the
many lean production methods of reducing waste in manufacturing process. It provides a rapid
and efficient way of converting a manufacturing process from running the current product to
running the next product. This rapid changeover is the key to reducing production lost sizes
and thereby improving the flow.