Quality Gurus The Quality Gurus²Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Joseph Juran, Philip Crosby, Armand V. Feigenbaum, Dr. H.James Harrington, Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, Dr. Walter A. Shewhart, Shigeo Shingo, Frederick Taylor, and Dr. Genichi Taguchi²have made a significant impact on the world through their contributions to improving not only businesses, but all organizations including state and national governments, military organizations, educational institutions, healthcare organizations, and many other establishments and organizations. PHILIP CROSBY (1926±2001) Philip Bayard Crosby was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1926. After Crosby graduated from high school. In 1946 Crosby entered the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine in Cleveland. In 1952 Crosby went to work for the Crosley Corp. in Richmond, Indiana, as a junior electronic test technician. He joined the American Society for Quality, where his early concepts concerning Quality began to form. In 1955, he went to work for Bendix Corp. as a reliability technician and quality engineer. He investigated defects found by the test people and inspectors. In 1957 he became a senior quality engineer with Martin Marietta Co. in Orlando, Florida. During his eight years with Martin Marietta, Crosby developed his "Zero Defects" concepts, began writing articles for various journals, and started his speaking career. In 1965 International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) hired Crosby as vice president in charge of corporate quality. During his fourteen years with ITT, Crosby worked with many of the world's largest industrial and service companies, implementing his pragmatic management philosophy, and found that it worked. After a number of years in industry, Crosby established the Crosby Quality College in Winter Park, Florida. He is well known as an author and consultant and has written many articles and books. He is probably best known for his book Quality is Free (1979) and concepts such as his Absolutes of Quality Management, Zero Defects, Quality Management Maturity Grid, 14 Quality Improvement Steps, Cost of Quality, and Cost of Nonconformance. Other books he has written include Quality Without Tears (1984) and Completeness (1994). Attention to customer requirements and preventing defects is evident in Crosby's definitions of quality and "non-quality" as follows: "Quality is conformance to requirements; non-quality is nonconformance." Crosby's Cost Of Quality. In his book Quality Is Free, Crosby makes the point that it costs money to achieve quality, but it costs more money when quality is not achieved. When an organization designs and builds an item right the first time (or provides a service without errors), quality is free. It does not cost anything above what would have already been spent. When an organization has to rework or scrap an item because of poor quality, it costs more. Crosby discusses Cost of Quality and Cost of Nonconformance or Cost of Nonquality. The intention is spend mo re money on preventing defects and less on inspection and rework. Crosby's Four Absolutes Of Quality. Crosby espoused his basic theories about quality in four Absolutes of Quality Management as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. Quality means conformance to requirements, not goodness. The system for causing quality is prevention, not appraisal. The performance standard must be zero defects, not "that's close enough." The measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance, not indexes. To support his Four Absolutes of Quality Management, Crosby developed the Quality Management Maturity Grid and Fourteen Steps of Quality Improvement. Crosby sees the Quality Management Maturity Grid as a first step in moving an organization towards quality management. After a company has located its position on the grid, it implements a quality improvement system based on Crosby's Fourteen Steps of Quality Improvement. Crosby's Absolutes of Quality Management are further delineated in his Fourteen Steps of Quality Improvement as shown below: Step 1. Management Commitment Step 2. Quality Improvement Teams Step 3. Quality Measurement Step 4. Cost of Quality Evaluation Step 5. Quality Awareness Step 6. Corrective Action Step 7. Zero-Defects Planning Step 8. Supervisory Training Step 9. Zero Defects Step 10. Goal Setting Step 11. Error Cause Removal Step 12. Recognition Step 13. Quality Councils Step 14. Do It All Over Again DR. H. JAMES HARRINGTON An author and consultant in the area of process improvement, Harrington spent forty years with IBM. His career included serving as Senior Engineer and Project Manager of Quality Assurance for IBM, San Jose, California. He was President of Harrington, Hurd and Reicker, a well-known performance improvement consulting firm until Ernst & Young bought the organization. He is the international quality advisor for Ernst and Young and on the board of directors of various national and international companies. H. James Harrington has been part of the quality movement for over 57 years. In 1950 he served as a Reliability Engineer at IBM and then moved to Supplier Quality Control at IBM¶s Owego Federal Systems Division. He then assumed the responsibility for IBM¶s Quality Engineering on the Titan Missile Program. His contributions to quality of the Missile Control System won him a special award from the government ± the Mac Titan Award. He then worked at IBM Corporate Headquarters in Armak to define the quality reporting system for the IBM organization and its customer set. He was then selected to go to San Jose to set up the quality system for the new plant. Following that assignment he was assigned to improve reliability of the 1800 process control system on a special program called Stamina. To accomplish this, he used the most advanced military quality and reliability techniques and applied them to the commercial areas. This resulted in the improvement of over 400% and increased revenue for IBM of many millions of dollars. He became Manager of the Quality Research Center at IBM where he developed the most advanced Poor-Quality Cost System in use today. It included customer- incurred quality cost. He then initiated a program called Quality Integration that moved the responsibilities for quality out of the QA operations into Development Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Test Engineering, Manufacturing and Purchasing. This program was implemented in most of the IBM plants around the world saving many millions and millions of dollars as it reduced the total quality effort expenditure by over 30%. In the late 1970s he started the first Quality Circle program in IBM USA. In the early 1980s he was selected as part of the IBM team to set up the IBM Corporate Quality Training Center. In the early 1980s he prepared a technical paper called ³Process Compatibility.´ As a result, he headed up a project to do detailed benchmarking of IBM processes in the U.S., Germany, and Japan. This resulted in a 15% cost reduction and 35% improvement in quality. Cycle time was reduced by 25%. This focus on the process led to selecting critical processes and redesigning them. In 1985 he took a two year sabbatical from IBM to become President and Chairman of the Board for ASQC. In 1987 he left ASQC and IBM to start his own consulting firm, Harrington Hurd and Rieker. They used Harrington¶s approach to Process Redesign and Quality Strategic Planning with companies like HP, Martin Marietta, Texaco, and P&G. As a result, they grew very fast and in 1989 his consulting firm was purchased by Ernst & Young. He became a Principal for Ernst & Young and served as their International Quality Advisor for ten years, working to develop quality methodologies that were used by Ernst & Young consultants throughout the world. During that period of time the Ernst & Young consulting activities grew by over 10,000%. In one case alone the Ernst & Young team did 100 Fast Action Solution Teams saving a total of over $130 million. In 2000 he retired from Ernst & Young to become CEO of Systemcorp, a mid-sized software company that had financial problems. Using quality methodologies, he turned it around and it was sold to IBM at an excellent profit as sales had by more than 800%. He then started Harrington Institute. In 2003 the World Bank selected him to go to Zimbabwe to redesign the way they gave out grants through the African Capacity Building Foundation. Again quality process approaches were used to make the transformation with an increased focus on knowledge management. In 2004 HE opened the Middle East branch of Harrington Institute in Dubai and he was selected to be the Chairman of the Advisory Board for the ETQM College. Over the past four years he has redesigned the Dubai City Government to make it more customer focused, transformed family-owned businesses into corporations, and applied quality approaches to the handicap to help them become more self-sufficient. HE is presently the COO of Define Properties, a major property management firm in Dubai where he is using quality principles and approaches to redefine the way property is managed. In the 1980s and µ90s HE served as an A-Level Member of TC 106, the Quality Standard for 12 years, and TC207, the Environmental Standards Group, for 8 years. In the early 1980s HE led over 12 tours of quality professionals who lectured in countries around the world. It was called ³The Crusade for Quality.´ They toured countries like Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Japan, China, Singapore, Mexico, Germany, England, Saudi Arabia, Italy, New Zealand and Australia, just to name a few. In each country they put on free conferences with the local quality association where the group gave all the papers. The purpose of these trips was to expand the quality culture in each of the countries and to improve relationships between the U.S and these countries. He was selected by the Chinese Government to put on two-week training programs for the top CEOs in China and the highest level in the government which he did for four-year period. The Chinese Government made him their Honorary Quality Advisor. In the late 1980s his book, The Improvement Process was selected by the Israeli Government to use to train all of their export CEOs/Presidents on quality methodologies. He set up the class and trained the trainers who delivered the classes to all of these In the early 1980s He and Dr. Ishikawa and Dr. Gatchalian got together and formed the Asia Pacific Quality Organization. This is an umbrella group that brought together the individual country¶s quality organizations that border on the Pacific and Indian oceans. The University of Quebec in Montreal has selected him as their U.S. Chair for Technology for Project Management. While he was President and Chairman of ASQC he pushed to get the Malcolm Baldrige Award through Congress and he served as the First Treasurer of the Malcolm Baldrige Consortium. In October 1998 the Asia Pacific Quality Organization approached him and asked him to be responsible for developing, organizing, and implementing the Asia Pacific International Quality Award because it was his idea. He set up the international committee, established the award¶s criteria and he was responsible for the first few cycles. The first award ceremony was held in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2000 where five different Asian companies won the award. In 1999 he was asked to help transform Trinidad into a Quality Nation. The goal was to accomplish within a five-year period as much as Singapore had accomplished in the last 20 years. He worked with a high-level team assigned by the Prime Minister and led them through a process that resulted in a three-year improvement plan. This plan included all school systems, the total national and local government, tourism industry, farming, oil production, and manufacturing. Harrington is an ASQ Certified Reliability and Quality Engineer. He is one of the very few registered as a Professional Quality Engineer in the State of California and he is a Certified Professional Manager. In 1994 Harrington established the Walter L. Hurd Foundation located in Manila, Philippines. Harrington served as president and chairman of the American So ciety for Quality and the International Academy for Quality. In addition, he has been elected as an honorary member of six quality associations outside of North America and was selected for the Singapore Hall of Fame. DR. KAORU ISHIKAWA (1915±1989) A professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo and a student of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Ishikawa was active in the quality movement in Japan, and was a member of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. He was awarded the Deming Prize, the Nihon Keizai Press Prize, and the Industrial Standardization Prize for his writings on quality control, and the Grant Award from the American Society for Quality Control for his educational program on quality control. Ishikawa's book, Guide to Quality Control (1982), is considered a classic because of its indepth explanations of quality tools and related statistics. The tool for which he is best known is the cause and effect diagram. Ishikawa is considered the Father of the Quality Circle Movement. Letters of praise from representatives of companies for which he was a consultant were published in his book What Is Total Quality Control? (1985). Those companies include IBM, Ford, Bridgestone, Komatsu Manufacturing, and Cummins Engine Co. Ishikawa believed that quality improvement initiatives must be organization-wide in order to be successful and sustainable over the long term. He promoted the use of Quality Circles to: (1) Support improvement; (2) Respect human relations in the workplace; (3) Increase job satisfaction; and (4) More fully recognize employee capabilities and utilize their ideas. Quality Circles are effective when management understands statistical techniques and act on recommendations from members of the Quality Circles. Kaoru Ishikawa wanted to change the way people think about work. He urged managers to resist becoming content with merely improving a product's quality, insisting that quality improvement can always go one step further. His notion of company-wide quality control called for continued customer service. This meant that a customer would continue receiving service even after receiving the product. This service would extend across the company itself in all levels of management, and even beyond the company to the everyday lives of those involved. According to Ishikawa, quality improvement is a continuous process, and it can always be taken one step further. With his cause and effect diagram (also called the "Ishikawa" or "fishbone" diagram) this management leader made significant and specific advancements in quality improvement. With the use of this new diagram, the user can see all possible causes of a result, and hopefully find the root of process imperfections. By pinpointing root problems, this diagram provides quality improvement from the "bottom up." Dr. W. Edwards Deming --one of Isikawa's colleagues -- adopted this diagram and used it to teach Total Quality Control in Japan as early as World War II. Both Ishikawa and Deming use this diagram as one the first tools in the quality management process. Ishikawa also showed the importance of the seven quality tools: control chart, run chart, histogram, scatter diagram, Pareto chart, and flowchart. Additionally, Ishikawa explored the concept of quality circles-- a Japanese philosophy which he drew from obscurity into world wide acceptance. .Ishikawa believed in the importance of support and leadership from top level management. He continually urged top level executives to take quality control courses, knowing that without the support of the management, these programs would ultimately fail. He stressed that it would take firm commitment from the entire hierarchy of employees to reach the company's potential for success. Another area of quality improvement that Ishikawa emphasized is quality throughout a product's life cycle -- not just during production. Although he believed strongly in creating standards, he felt that standards were like continuous quality improvement programs -- they too should be constantly evaluated and changed. Standards are not the ultimate source of decision making; customer satisfaction is. He wanted managers to consistently meet consumer needs; from these needs, all other decisions should stem. Besides his own developments, Ishikawa drew and expounded on principles from other quality gurus, including those of one man in particular: W. Edwards Deming, creator of the Plan-Do-Check-Act model. Ishikawa expanded Deming's four steps into the following six: y y y y y y Determine goals and targets. Determine methods of reaching goals. Engage in education and training. Implement work. Check the effects of implementation. Take appropriate action. DR. WALTER A. SHEWHART (1891±1967) Walter Shewhart was born in New Canton, Illinois on 18 March 1891 to Anton and Esta Barney Shewhart. He received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Illinois, then attended the University of California at Berkeley from which he was awarded a Doctorate in physics in 1917. He taught at both universities and went on to head the department of physics at Wisconsin Normal School at LaCrosse for a short period of time. In 1918 Shewhart joined the Western Electric Company to assist their engineers in improving the quality of telephone hardware. Western Electric produced hardware for the Bell Telephone Company, which became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). The Western Electric Company manufactured telephone equipment for them and since 1905 its major plant was the Hawthorne Plant in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago. The company and its factory grew rapidly with the need for telephones. By 1913 there were 14 000 employees and by 1930 there were 43 000. It was one of the largest manufacturing plants in the country. Shewart worked at Hawthorne until 1925 when he moved to the Bell Telephone Research Laboratories where he remained until his retirement in 1956. While at Hawthorne, Shewhart met and influenced W Edwards Deming who went on to champion Shewhart's methods. Joseph Juran also worked at Hawthorne from 1924 to 1941 and was influenced by Shewhart. Shewhart, Deming, and Juran are often considered to be the three founders of the quality improvement movement. Two of Shewhart's contributions continue to influence the daily work of quality²namely, control charts and the Plan±Do± Study±Act (PDSA) cycle. Reducing variation: statistical process control The focus on reducing variation as a way to improve quality is a non-obvious contribution of quality management. When the ancients built their temples they needed squared stones that would fit together. If the door of a new car is too big, it will not close. If it is too small, the rain will come in. In a high quality car the doors and the frame match with precision. Today all customers would expect such a fit. By way of contrast, one of the most widely observed phenomena in population health is regional and small area variation in care. Medicine has only started down the road of reducing variation. Shewhart identified two categories of variation which he called ³assignable-cause´ and ³chance-cause´ variation. Others call the two categories ³special-cause´ and ³common- cause´ variation, respectively. He devised the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two. The various control charts that Shewhart proposed for variables and attributes include mean, range, np, p, c, and u charts. Shewhart reported that bringing a process into a state of statistical control²where there is only chance-cause (common-cause) variation²and keeping it in control was needed to reduce waste and improve quality. Shewhart is referred to as the ³father of statistical quality control´. Shewhart's historical memorandum of 16 May 1924 proposed the use of the statistical control chart to his supervisors. In the preface to his book ³Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product´ Shewhart stated: ³The object of industry is to set up economic ways of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort. Through the use of the scientific method, extended to take account of modern statistical concepts, it has been found 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 a 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. More recently, other industries have re- discovered Shewhart's tools of statistical process control. Motorola developed the philosophy for quality improvement, based on statistical process control, which is called ³Six Sigma´. Sigma is the Greek letter used to denote the standard deviation of a population. In 1988 Motorola won the US Baldrige National Quality Award and this brought the six sigma concept to public attention. Several other organizations started using six sigma, and General Electric, under Jack Welch's leadership, popularized the six sigma method. ³Sigma is a statistical unit of measurement that describes the distribution about the mean of any process or procedure. A process or procedure that can achieve plus or minus six-sigma capability can be expected to have a defect rate of no more than a few parts per million, even allowing for some shift in the mean. In statistical terms, this approaches zero defects´. Shewhart cycle The Shewhart cycle or Shewhart learning and 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. While Deming marketed the cycle to the masses²a cycle which he called the Shewhart cycle²most people referred to it as the Deming cycle. The Shewhart cycle has the following four stages: y y y y Plan: identify what can be improved and what change is needed Do: implement the design change Study: measure and analyse the process or outcome 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. This is a never ending process. After the easy low cost changes are made (the low hanging fruit harvested), 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. Shewhart published numerous articles, many of which were in the Bell System Technical Journal, and two books: ³Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product´ in 1931 and ³Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control´ in 1939 (reprinted in 1986). He was also the first editor of the John Wiley and Sons ³Mathematical Statistics Series´, and he continued to serve in this capacity for more than 20 years. Shewhart served as a consultant in the War Department during World War II and the resultant American War Standards helped in the productivity efforts. Other consultancy work included working with the United Nations and the government of India. Among the awards that Shewhart received was the Holley Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and he was the first recipient of the Shewhart Medal by the American Society for Quality Control. However, Deming rightfully credited Shewhart with the development of theories of process control as well as the Shewhart transformation process on which the Deming PDCA (PlanDo-Check or Study-Act) Cycle is based. Shewhart's theories were first published in his book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (1931). DR. GENICHI TAGUCHI (B. 1924) Dr. Genichi Taguchi was a Japanese engineer and statistician who defined what product specification means and how this can be translated into cost effective production. He worked in the Japanese Ministry of Public Health and Welfare, Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Ministry of Education. He also worked with the Electrical Communications Laboratory of the Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Co. to increase the productivity of the R&D activities. Genichi Taguchi stressed quality right from the design stage and not just as an inspection. In short, he believed quality was related to process design. Dr Genichi Taguchi was born in 1924 in Japan. Initially, he served the Astronomical Department of the Navigation Institute of the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. Later, he joined the Ministry of Public Health and Welfare and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. It was here that he worked with the eminent Japanese statistician Matosaburo Masuyama and gained vital insights into statistical analysis. His expertise in statistics garnered him an opportunity to work with reputed pharmaceutical company Morinaga Seika and its sister company, Morinaga Pharmaceuticals. Taguchi then joined the Nippon Telegraph Electrical Communications Laboratory. Here, he was entrusted with the task of enhancing the productivity of the Research and Development (R & D) department. To achieve this objective, Taguchi trained the engineers to improve productivity through effective and simple techniques. Initially, Taguchi visited many Japanese companies to study different operating procedures. He would later educate the engineers on what he had learned. Eventually, he developed his own techniques, and his visits to companies helped him propagate his techniques. He stayed at the Nippon Telegraph Electrical Communications Laboratory for over 12 years Taguchi Influence Soon, Japanese companies like Toyota adopted Taguchi¶s techniques because they foresaw its great advantages. In 1951, he published a book that introduced the concept of orthogonal arrays. In his quest for a methodology for high quality, he met two legendary statisticians at the Indian Statistical Institute - R. A. Fisher and Walter A. Shewhart. After his interactions with them, he published a book on Design of Experiments in 1957. In the West In 1962, Taguchi was invited to visit Princeton University USA as a Visiting Research Associate. Here, eminent statistician John Tukey arranged a meeting between Taguchi and the statisticians of AT&T Bell Laboratories. He also presented his views and expertise on Design on Experiments. Despite his visit to USA, the Western world remained largely unaware of Taguchi¶s methodologies. For the next 18 years, from 1964 to 1982, he was a Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. In 1966, along with other statisticians, Taguchi published Management by Total Results. Quality loss function In 1970, Taguchi devised a new concept in quality called the Quality Loss Function. He published two more books this year, along with the third edition of Design of Experiments. Taguchi ± Achievements The popularity of his books and his pioneering work earned him the Deming application prize in 1960. Taguchi was also a two-time winner of the Deming award for literature on quality (1951 and 1953). In 1980, Bell Laboratories invited him to visit again. He helped Bell Laboratories incorporate his methodologies, this time triggering great interest in Taguchi methodologies throughout the Western Community. Companies like Xerox and Ford USA soon incorporated his methodology. Taguchi detested the idea of quality as an inspection after manufacture and pushed quality as emergent from the design stage. His concept of Design of Experiments (DOE) allows engineers to design product/process tests through simple calculations. DOE can also be used as a troubleshooting technique. Quality loss Unlike the western definition of quality, Taguchi defined quality loss, as ³loss imparted by the product to society from the time the product is shipped.´ The loss factor encompasses two losses: 1. Loss at the company end due to financial set-up, time, man-hours, productivity, rework, scrap, warranty cost, equipment downtime cost and loss of customer trust. 2. Loss at the customer end due to substandard product delivery, financial setbacks, distrust of customers, shared value deprecation, wasted time and project delays. Taguchi Loss Function was developed on the premise that the greater the variation of a value from the standard, the greater the costs incurred. Taguchi Loss Function suggests that organizations must settle for options that cost the least. Organizations should thus make decisions after conducting a cost analysis and understanding all implications. It also suggests that the lowest cost decision is not always the best one for the organization. This decision depends on organizational priorities. In the mid 1950s Taguchi was Indian Statistical Institute visiting professor, where he met Walter Shewhart. He was a Visiting Research Associate at Princeton University in 1962, the same year he received his Ph.D. from Kyushu University. He was a Professor at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University and Director of the Japanese Academy of Quality. Taguchi was awarded the Deming Application prize (1960), Deming awards for literature on quality (1951, 1953, and 1984), Willard F. Rockwell Medal by the International Technologies Institute (1986). Taguchi's contributions are in robust design in the area of product development. The Taguchi Loss Function, The Taguchi Method (Design of Experiments), and other methodologies have made major contributions in the reduction of variation and greatly improved engineering quality and productivity. By consciously considering the noise factors (environmental variation during the product's usage, manufacturing variation, and component deterioration) and the cost of failure in the field, Taguchi methodologies help ensure customer satisfaction. Robust Design focuses on improving the fundamental function of the product or process, thus facilitating flexible designs and concurrent engineering. Taguchi product development includes three stages: (1) system design (the non-statistical stage for engineering, marketing, customer and other knowledge); (2) parameter stage (determining how the product should perform against defined parameters; and (3) tolerance design (finding the balance between manufacturing cost and loss).