Armand Feigenbaum’s Theoretical Achievements Essay

Introduction

Armand Feigenbaum was a passionate engineer and businessperson who contributed immensely to the theory and practice of quality control management. His inventions and frameworks assisted multiple companies globally to install and successfully maintain quality in their production facilities for which Feigenbaum became famous and revered among modern scholars. This paper will discuss several of his major theoretical achievements such as total quality management, hidden factory concept, quality accountability, and quality costs which are all used in today’s enterprise management.

Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) became one of the greatest paradigmatic changes in quality control due to its comprehensive nature that allowed to centralize and imbue into one framework all quality-related actions and procedures. TQM is an approach to quality management that is centered on the improvements across all structural levels of functioning in the organization (Lohrmann & Reichert 2010).

Among the key principles, there is the view that quality depends on customer’s views, the responsibility of management for quality improvement initiatives, and other axioms. This model allowed to curb the costs of production of service or goods (Sadikoglu & Olcay 2014). It also inspired other prominent quality management frameworks such as Six Sigma (Jourabchi et al. 2014). This is why it still holds significant weight in the history of QM development.

Hidden Factory Concept

Another addition of Feigenbaum to the quality control theory is the concept of a hidden factory. It is a theoretical notion designed for clarifying the importance of quality control. Essentially, it imbues the idea that all the obscure processes that occur during the process of correcting errors are voluminous enough to account as a separate factory. In terms of practical application, the concept contributes greatly to managers accepting the importance of quality control initiatives (Rødseth & Schjølberg 2014). The pragmatism inspired by this concept brought greater flexibility and decreased cost of conversion once the firm realizes its critical weak points and corrects them which benefited the variety of quality management as an array of business solutions.

Quality Accountability

The notion of quality accountability may seem simple yet also holds great value to quality management due to its priority-setting nature. The concept basically conveys the idea that despite the fact that quality should be accounted for on all levels, the responsibility for all of minor and major initiatives should be at the higher executive level (Beckford 2016). The great contribution of quality accountability resides with its benefit of greater organizational transparency and structural straightforwardness where each individual or body is assigned a specific place in the hierarchy of quality management.

Quality Costs

Prior to the introduction of the quality costs notion, it was generally perceived that higher quality equals higher expenses (Dale & Plunkett 2017). This concept provided cost assessment instruments and overall clarity to the quality spendings management. As the notion introduced categorization and grouping of different costs and quality initiatives, companies could have a better-structured way to analyze and optimize their budgets (Warzecha 2017). Naturally, the process of calculation of this new indicator produced a need for reporting which enhanced accountability of organizations, made them more transparent and allowed for greater internal and external appraisal potential.

Conclusion

All in all, the impact of Armand Feigenbaum, the author of multiple innovative concepts and frameworks, to the sphere of quality management is truly unique. Total quality management brought many organizations improved customer satisfaction and reduction in manufacturing costs. The hidden factory concept increased clarity among managers about the need for quality management. Its flexibility allowed for its seamless integration to other models.

Quality accountability and costs contributed significantly to establishing transparency in business sphere and clarified quality control. Despite major sophistication, these concepts ushered new framework-related improvements and systematized the existing knowledge along the lines of quality-firm performance dichotomy.

Reference List

1. Beckford, J 2016, Quality: a critical introduction, 4th edn, Taylor & Francis, New York, NY.
2. Dale, BG & Plunkett, JJ 2017, Quality costing, 3rd edn, Taylor & Francis, New York, NY.
3. Jourabchi, SMM, Arabian, T, Leman, Z & Ismail, MYB 2014, ‘Contribution of lean and Six Sigma to effective cost of quality management’, International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 149–165.
4. Lohrmann, M & Reichert, M 2010, Basic considerations on business process quality. Web.
5. Rødseth, H & Schjølberg, P 2014, ‘The importance of asset management and hidden factory for integrated planning’, Advanced Materials Research, vol. 1039, pp. 577-584.
6. Sadikoglu, E & Olcay, H 2014, ‘The effects of total quality management practices on performance and the reasons of and the barriers to TQM practices in Turkey’, Advances in Decision Sciences, vol. 2014, pp. 1-17.
7. Warzecha, B 2017, The problem with quality management, Verlag für Planung und Organisation, Berlin, Germany.