Total Quality Management
Order Description
Provide a summary in your own words of the article you have been requested to read and analyze in the following space.
II. KEY LEARNING POINTS
a) What are the main points of the assigned article “TQM Gurus”? (200 words)
b) Explain the following Deming point? (150 words)
“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality; eliminate the need for mass inspection by building quality into the product”.
c) Explain the difference between the following two Deming’s points? (150 words)
Point 6: Institute training on the job.
Point 13: Institute a vigorous education and self-improvement program.
d) List the four types of quality costs and give three examples on each type?
(200 words)
III. CRITICAL ANALYSIS (250 words)
? In your opinion, are the Gurus principles applicable in the MENA region? Why? (250 words)
IV. Practical Implications (250 words)
Based on your experience at your work place, explain how the improvement cycle can be applied?(250 words) (Notice that I’m working in government sector)
Managing Service Quality
Emerald Article: The quality gurus – their approaches described and
considered
Tony Bendell, Roger Penson, Samantha Carr
Article information:
To cite this document: Tony Bendell, Roger Penson, Samantha Carr, (1995),”The quality gurus – their approaches described and
considered”, Managing Service Quality, Vol. 5 Iss: 6 pp. 44 – 48
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The importance of quality as an objective is
now widely recognized throughout the world.
With increasing customer demands and the
removal of barriers to trade, inefficient suppliers
or suppliers of low quality goods and
services are unlikely to survive for long. The
customer is no longer king – he is the whole
reason for being. The American quality guru,
Armand Feigenbaum, has gone as far as
saying, “Quality is now the single most important
force in organisational success and
growth in national and international markets”.
The quality gurus discussed in this article
have each made major contributions to customer
service as we know it today. Perhaps
most significant are the contributions made
by Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum, the
American quality gurus who visited Japan
shortly after the Second World War; and the
Japanese quality guru, Ishikawa. The
approaches of Taguchi and Shingo are also
considered. This article highlights the main
messages of the gurus and how principles
which may have originally focused on the
product can be applied to service quality.
W. Edwards Deming spent his early career
in the USA during which he developed the
work of the statistician Walter Shewhart, and
applied it to routine clerical operations. While
working in Japan in the 1950s, having learned
from his experiences in the USA, Deming
pushed senior management to become actively
involved in their company’s quality
improvement programmes. Deming’s message
spread beyond statistical methods and he
introduced the Japanese to a systematic
approach to problem solving which became
known as the Deming or PDCA (plan, do,
check, action) cycle (see Figure 1). The normal
tendency, without the discipline imposed
by the cycle, is to skimp on the planning and
checking phases, and perhaps to concentrate
on the doing element. This leads to firefighting,
instead of a controlled assessment of
the situation.
Deming’s subsequent work has been more
management-based; indeed, his famous 14
points for management were produced to help
people to understand and implement “… the
total transformation of Western style management”
that he believed necessary. Deming
said that adaptation of, and action on, the 14
points are a signal that management intends
to stay in business. His 14 points are as follows:
44
Managing Service Quality
Volume 5 · Number 6 · 1995 · pp. 44–48
© MCB University Press · ISSN 0960-4529
Illuminate
The quality gurus – their
approaches described
and considered
Tony Bendell,
Roger Penson
and Samantha Carr
The authors
Tony Bendell is East Midlands Electricity Professor of
Quality Management at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
Roger Penson is Senior Consultant and Samantha Carr a
Researcher, both at Services Ltd, West Bridgford, Nottingham,
UK.
Abstract
Discusses the major contributions of various quality gurus.
Highlights the main messages and how principles which
originally focused on the product can now be applied to
services. Draws attention to the competitive importance of
quality and concludes that business survival depends on
quality.
(1) Create constancy of purpose to improve
product and service.
(2) Adopt new philosophy for new economic
age by management learning responsibilities
and taking leadership for change.
(3) Cease dependence on inspection to
achieve quality; eliminate the need for
mass inspection by building quality into
the product.
(4) End awarding business on price; instead,
minimize total cost and move towards
single suppliers for items.
(5) Improve constantly and forever the
system of production and service to
improve quality and productivity and to
decrease costs.
(6) Institute training on the job.
(7) Institute leadership; supervision should
be to help do a better job; overhaul
supervision of management and production
workers.
(8) Drive out fear so that all may work
effectively for the organization.
(9) Break down barriers between departments;
research, design and sales must
work together to foresee problems in
production and use.
(10) Eliminate slogans, exhortations and
numerical targets for the workforce,
such as “zero defects” or new productivity
levels. Such exhortations are diversionary
as the bulk of the problems
belong to the system and are beyond the
power of the workforce.
(11) Eliminate quotas or work standards, and
management by objectives or numerical
goals; substitute leadership.
(12) Remove barriers that rob people of their
right to pride of workmanship; hourly
workers, management and engineering;
eliminate annual or merit ratings and
management by objectives.
(13) Institute a vigorous education and selfimprovement
programme.
(14) Put everyone in the organization to work
to accomplish the transformation.
It can be seen that the 14 points stress the
need for continuous improvement in the
system of production and service. While very
important, the 14 points do not themselves
provide implementation tools, although
Deming does provide a seven-point action
plan:
(1) Management struggles over the 14 points
and agrees meaning and plans direction.
(2) Management takes pride and develops
courage for the new direction.
(3) Management explains to the people in the
company why change is necessary.
(4) Divide every company activity into stages,
identifying the customer of each stage as
the next stage. Continual improvement of
methods should take place at each stage,
and stages should work together towards
quality.
(5) Start as soon and as quickly as possible to
construct an organization to guide continual
quality improvement.
(6) Everyone can take part in a team to
improve the input and output of any
stage.
(7) Embark on construction of organization
for quality.
Like Deming, Dr Joseph Juran was invited to
lecture in Japan. He focused on the wider
issues of quality: planning and organizational
issues, management’s responsibility for quality
and the need to set goals and targets for
improvement. He argued that quality control
should be conducted as an integral part of
management control. Juran coined the
phrase, “There is gold in the mine”, referring
to the huge cost savings which can be made by
measuring and resolving quality problems.
However, it is not at the surface, you have to
dig for it.
Juran has used the measurement of costs
attributable to quality problems within organizations
to capture the attention of senior
management in the West. Most organizations
are unaware of the real costs incurred from
doing things wrong and then doing it all over
45
Tony Bendell, Roger Penson and Samantha Carr
Volume 5 · Number 6 · 1995 · 44–48
Figure 1 Deming’s plan, do, check, action cycle
Study the results
What did we learn?
What can we predict?
Observe effects of
change or test
Decide team purpose
Decide desirable changes
What data are available?
Plan use of data
Carry out (small-scale)
change or test
4 1
3 2
again. Looking systematically at the cost of
quality can provide a unifying approach to
drive quality improvement within any organization.
It is still the case that many organizations
find it difficult to justify improvements
to services or product because the cost of
effecting the necessary changes is perceived as
too high. In making these judgements, the
cost of current customer dissatisfaction or the
“failure cost” in the provision of poor service
is neglected.
Typically, cost of quality is seen as being
related only to quality assurance activities
such as inspection or laboratory facilities. The
cost of failure, i.e. of getting it wrong, has
often been overlooked when evaluating the
cost effectiveness of quality or service
improvements. External failure cost, when
poor product or service actually reaches the
customer – reflected in customer complaints,
rejected service and returned material identified
by the customer – tend to be substantially
higher than internal failure costs (the cost of
problems identified internally) such as scrap,
redesign and waste.
Intrinsic to Juran’s message on quality is
the belief that “Quality does not happen by
accident, it must be planned”. Juran sees
quality planning as part of the quality trilogy
of quality planning, quality control and quality
improvement. His quality planning road
map identifies the key elements necessary to
implement company-wide strategic quality
planning:
(1) Identify who the customers are.
(2) Determine the needs of those customers.
(3) Translate those needs into the organization’s
language.
(4) Develop a product that can respond to
those needs.
(5) Optimize the product features so as to
meet the organization’s needs as well as
customer needs.
(6) Develop a process which is able to produce
the product.
(7) Optimize the process.
(8) Prove that the process can produce the
product under operating conditions.
(9) Transfer the process to operations.
This process can be applied with both the
internal and the crucial external customer in
mind.
Like Deming, Juran has been critical of
senior management in the West but he sees
the 1990s as the time when the improvement
efforts made by Western organizations over
the last decade will finally bear fruit.
Dr Armand Feigenbaum is the originator
of total quality control. The concept extends
the administrative function to include the
measurement and control of quality at every
stage, from customer specification and sales,
through design, engineering, assembly and
shipment. A total quality system is defined by
him as, “The agreed company-wide and
plant-wide operating work structure, documented
in effective, integrated technical and
managerial procedures for guiding the coordinated
actions of the people, the machines
and the information of the company and plant
in the best and most practical ways to assure
customer quality satisfaction and economical
costs of quality”. Operating quality costs can
be divided into:
• prevention costs – including quality planning;
• appraisal costs – including inspection;
• internal failure costs – including scrap and
rework;
• external failure costs – including warranty
costs, and product recall.
Feigenbaum argues that reductions in operating
quality costs result from establishing a
total quality system for two reasons:
(1) The lack of existing, effective customeroriented
customer standards may mean
that the current quality of products is not
optimal, given their use.
(2) Expenditure on prevention costs can lead
to a severalfold reduction in internal and
external failure costs.
Total quality control for the 1990s is defined
by Feigenbaum in the form of ten crucial
benchmarks, which state that quality:
(1) is a company-wide process;
(2) is what the customer says it is;
(3) and cost are a sum, not a difference;
(4) requires both individual and team
zealotry;
(5) is a way of managing;
(6) and innovation are mutually dependent;
(7) is an ethic;
(8) requires continuous improvement;
(9) is the most cost-effective, least capitalintensive
route to productivity;
(10) is implemented within a total system
connected with customers and suppliers.
These benchmarks make quality a way of
totally focusing the company on the customer,
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Tony Bendell, Roger Penson and Samantha Carr
Volume 5 · Number 6 · 1995 · 44–48
whether it be the end customer or the person
at the next desk.
Dr Ishikawa, the first of the Japanese gurus
to be discussed, is perhaps best known to
many from the Ishikawa diagram, otherwise
known as the cause-and-effect diagram or
fishbone diagram. An illustration of the idea
appears in Figure 2. Ishikawa sees this diagram,
like other tools, as a device to assist
groups or quality circles in quality improvement.
He emphasizes open group communication
as critical to the construction of the
diagrams.
Ishikawa adapted technical methods and
made them accessible to all levels within the
organization. In particular, he championed
the use of what are commonly known as the
seven tools of quality control:
(1) Pareto charts – to prioritize action.
(2) Cause-and-effect diagrams – to identify
causes of variation.
(3) Stratification – to divide data into subsets.
(4) Check sheets – for data collection.
(5) Histograms – to display variation graphically.
(6) Scatter diagrams – to identify relationships
between two factors.
(7) Shewart’s control charts and graphs – to
monitor and control variation.
Ishikawa was a key player in the companywide
quality control movement which started
in Japan around 1955. It necessitates measurement
by all, with every function and all
levels participating in the improvement
process. He was also a pioneer of the quality
circle movement in Japan. The nature of
quality circles varies between companies,
although the circles typically consist of small
groups of five to ten people from the same
work area who meet voluntarily on a regular
basis to discuss, investigate, measure and
analyse work-related problems. The seven
tools of quality are used by the circle and
either any solutions to problems identified are
presented to management for authorization
before implementation, or the team has
authority to implement directly.
To meet increasing customer service
demands, a high level of responsiveness is
required at the front line. By definition, this
requires empowerment of staff. To control
service quality, therefore, visible management
commitment, quality of staff, training, measurement,
feedback and recognition for positive
outcomes are vital. So, too, is the need to
ensure that what is measured and rewarded
also promotes customer satisfaction. Over ten
million individuals in Japan are now involved
in quality circles. It should be noted that, in
the West, quality circles must be carefully
adapted if they are to be successful.
Dr Genichi Taguchi and Shigeo Shingo are
two other Japanese quality gurus whose ideas
contributed tremendously to Japan’s post-war
turnaround, and their methods are now finding
increasing use in the West. Like Ishikawa,
Taguchi has been able to simplify complex
statistical methods and make them comprehensible
to non-specialists. Taguchi methods
can be used for trouble-shooting in production,
but their main application is in the
design of new processes and products.
The quality loss function developed by
Taguchi in the late 1970s may be used to
measure and evaluate design decisions on a
financial basis. This is defined as “loss imparted
by the product to society from the time the
product is shipped”.
The loss includes not only the normal
company costs such as scrap and downtime,
but also costs to the customer in terms of poor
product performance and reliability. By using
the quality loss function – a mathematical
formula – decisions can be made to determine
or verify whether additional costs in production
will actually prove to be worthwhile in the
marketplace. Taguchi methods have been
widely implemented in the USA since the
early 1980s, and since the mid-1980s have
been applied more widely in the West.
Shigeo Shingo is perhaps not as well known
in the West as the two previous Japanese
gurus, although the impact of his work, particularly
in Japan, has been immense. From
1961 he started to develop Poka-Yoke systems.
Poka-Yoke systems – literally meaning
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Tony Bendell, Roger Penson and Samantha Carr
Volume 5 · Number 6 · 1995 · 44–48
Figure 2 Illustration of a cause-and-effect diagram
Problems Work methods
Equipment Measurement
Quality
Cause Effect
mistake proofing – use devices or work methods
which prevent defects from occurring.
Although developed for manufacturing systems,
Poka-Yoke has clear application in
administrative, customer-service and other
non-manufacturing systems. The basic idea is
to stop the process whenever a defect occurs,
define the cause and prevent the recurring
source of the defect. Poka-Yoke devices, in
effect, give 100 per cent inspection, but during
the process, when prevention is still possible,
and not after the event, when it is too late.
By using Shingo’s concept of zero quality
control, zero defects can be achieved.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, other very
vocal Western gurus have emerged. These
include Philip Crosby, who is probably most
well known for the concept of “do it right first
time”; Tom Peters who concentrates on customer
responsiveness and who views the
“nice-to-do” approach of the late 1970s as a
“must-do” in the 1990s; and Claus Möller
who has developed a concept of personal
quality, on which he believes “all other concepts
of quality are based”.
How can the messages of the quality gurus
help your organization? By taking note of the
unique messages of all the quality gurus, tools
and techniques can be employed to assist in
improving service quality. The main points
are:
• Management commitment and employee
awareness are essential. All levels of personnel
need to participate in the improvement
process. Deming’s 14 points provide
an effective starting-point to encourage the
necessary attributes.
• Juran emphasizes the need to plan and
prioritize actions with the quality planning
road map. Quality costing can be used to
prioritize and monitor improvement, and
to measure the progress of improvement.
Service quality can be measured once
qualitative and quantitative research has
defined what matters to the customer.
• Teamwork plays an important part in the
process of continuous improvement.
Indeed, problem solving and improved
communication are extremely difficult to
achieve without it! Ishikawa advocated
quality circles, which create greater worker
involvement and motivation leading to
greater commercial awareness and the aim
for ever-increasing goals.
• If all employees are to be involved in the
improvement process, then simple tools
and techniques need to be taught.
Ishikawa’s seven tools of quality control
can be used by all levels within an organization.
• Both Taguchi and Shingo provide more
technical tools to control areas including
industrial design and manufacturing.
Taguchi’s quality loss function includes the
costs to the customer resulting from poor
product performance and reliability.
• To achieve quality, management tools
should be studied. Feigenbaum’s concept
of total quality control stresses the need for
top-to-bottom commitment to quality.
Ishikawa also promotes the concept of
company-wide quality control.
• In today’s competitive markets, “quality as
perceived by the customer” has become a
key aim for many companies. Deming’s
message to “delight your customers” is
seen by many as the way to be competitive
in today’s markets.
The preoccupation with quality improvement
swept across North America in the 1980s, and
established bridgeheads in Europe. Continually
striving for improvements in service
quality is demanding of both people and
processes and demanding of the style and
culture of the company. However, if those in
Europe fail to pay sufficient attention to the
competitive importance of quality and customer
service, whether in the manufacturing
or service sectors, then they are unlikely to
survive for long. Business survival now
depends on quality.
48
Tony Bendell, Roger Penson and Samantha Carr
Volume 5 · Number 6 · 1995 · 44–48