ISO 9000 and Quality Gurus

You may wonder what's behind ISO 9000? Who are those guys who established principles, incorporated in ISO 9000. First of all, let's see who are these guys who contributed to quality. They are: Walter Shewhart, Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Genichi Taguchi,Armand Feigenbaum, Kaoru Ishikawa, and Philip Crosby.

Walter A. Shewhart (1891 � 1967) Born in Illinois, USA, Shewhart graduated University of Illinois and then he obtained the doctorate in physics at University of California in 1917. Working at Western Electric Company as an engineer, he was able to make a serious contribution to a major problem: reliability of the equipment buried underground. Control charts created by him were use to differentiate between assignable sources of variation and pure chances of variation. Shewhart studied randomness and recognized variability which exists in all manufacturing processes. In his opinion, reducing variability is equivalent to quality improvement. Later Shewhart worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories until his retirement in 1956. He wrote several articles and books, most representative being Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product in 1931, Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control in 1939. On more thing about Shewhart: he is considered to be the grandfather of quality control. Top of the page

W. Edwards Deming (1900 � 1993) Known as the father of quality, Deming was a statistics professor at New York University during the 40s. He studied for several years with Walter Shewhart; this was the base of his contribution to quality. After World War II, Deming was involved in assisting Japanese companies to reborn from their own ashes. His contribution was in improving quality, by setting a 14 points principles which should be the foundation for achieving quality improvements. Japanese companies applied extensively these principles; today's power of Japan and quality of their products has a strong root in this matter. Deming emphasized on the role of management in achieving quality. He noted that around 15% of poor quality was because of workers, and the rest of 85% was due to bad management, improper systems and processes. In his opinion, managers should involve employees in solving the problems, not simply to blame them for poor quality. Deming's 14 principles are: create constancy of purpose (short term reactions has to be replaced by long-term planning), adopt the new philosophy (management should adopt his philosophy, rather than to expect the employees to do that), cease dependence on inspection (it concerns to variation � in other words, if there is no variation, no inspection is needed because all products shows no defects), move towards a single supplier for any one item (working with several suppliers, automatically involves variation in raw materials), improve constantly and forever (it refers to decreasing variation, as a key to better quality), institute training on the job (another source of variation is the lack of training of workers; train them properly to do a certain job, and they will do it with far less variation), institute leadership (distinction between leadership and supervising), drive out fear (eliminate fear at worker's level to get their support for improvements. Fear is counter productive), break down barriers between departments (here comes the concept of "internal customer" which is found in TQM; a department is a supplier for next one. The second one is the client for the first one), eliminate slogans (usually, it's not the employee who did it wrong, but it's the system who allowed that. No need to create tension on worker, as long as the system fails to prevent problems), eliminate management by objectives (as long as workers had to achieve an established production level, quality will be a secondary target), remove barriers to pride of workmanship (bringing problems all the time to worker's ears, will create a discomfort for them. Lower satisfaction of workers equals a lower interest for doing good items), institute education and self � improvement (education is an asset. Everyone has to improve themselves), transformation is everyone's job (improvements exists at every level). The most important book he wrote among other is Out of the Crisis in 1987. What is relevant to this book along these 14 principles is that he initiated the movement toward Total Quality Management, even he didn't used this expression. Nowadays, there exists Deming Prize, introduced by JUSE (Japanese Union of scientists Engineers); this prize is awarded annually for best proponent of TQM. Top of the page SOURCE