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An Overview of Total Quality
Management
EVOLUTION OF QUALITY
The requirement for Quality Control dates back to the time when human race wanted
to replicate an object. The desire to control quality is as old as human’s ability to produce
things the forerunning attempts to control quality resulted in rather crude replicas of
original objects. These replicas were produced in a way that could easily be discerned by
the nacked eye.
As time passed, human’s developed the competence to duplicate objects so that they
become indistinguishable from one another. The drawback for this was that the assembly
with any alternation or adjustment was not possible.
Eli Whitney conceived the idea of perfect interchangeability of parts. He emphasised
that if proper raw material, methods and equipment are used and if workmen exercised
the right amount of course, items can be produced somewhat in an identical manner. In
1799, he contracted to supply rifles to the army. Mr. Whitney was partially successful in
getting each workman to make one part of the exact specification he could still do only
selective assembly. But did establish the fact that production time can be reduced.
Perhaps this was the germs of man production. It was not until the early 1800s that
man began to realise the necessity of tolerance in parts. The interchangeability in indus-
trial activity resulted in many problems on measurements. A Swedish engineer named
Johansson conceived the idea of a hard metal block that could be machined and polished
to exact dimension, which can be used as points of reference. These blocks were referred
to as ‘Jo’ blocks. In the middle of the 17th century, Pascal, the French philosopher and
mathematician become quite talker by the games of chance. He formulated that theory of
probability in association with Pierre Fermat. During the 1800s, considerable progress
was made in the development of the sampling theory.
Modern quality control or statistical quality control (SQC) as we know it today started
with invention of quality control chart by Walter A Shewhart of Bell Telephone Labs, USA
in 1930s. Dr. Shewhart proposed the statistical methods could be effectively used for
examining whether the items produced by any process were of uniform quality or not. The
real impetus for the application of these methods on a massive scale resulted form the
economic pressure for more efficient utilisation of equipment and resources during world
war II Dr. Shewhart wrote a book economic control of quality of manufactured products,
which was published in 1931. The objective explicitly put-forth in the title was ‘‘Economic
Control’’.
The influence of the US military services on the adoption of sampling acceptance
techniques was well established. World War II was the catalyst that made the control
charts applicable in the US. By applying quality control, the US was able to produce
military requirements inexpensively and in high volumes. The wartime standards pub-
lished in those days was known as ‘‘Z–1 standards’’.
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Naidu, N.V.R.. Total Quality Management, New Age International Ltd, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/biblioucv/detail.action?docID=358035.
Created from biblioucv on 2023-09-15 00:50:16.
Copyright © 2006. New Age International Ltd. All rights reserved.