Many prominent gurus have emerged, who have had guided the need for quality within the business operation, by the provision of insight that has had tangible and lasting impacts. These influential people have contributed to deriving models and theories, through which provisions of quality within the business setup can be enhanced and sustained.
Though the majority of them have passed away, their impacts are still felt in the modern society. In this regard, some of the major contributors have been Feigenbaum and Ishikawa. Feigenbaum, an American, developed the concept of total quality management based on three critical procedures that business must adopt to realize efficiency. The three steps encompass quality leadership, appropriate quality technology, and commitment of the organization to quality.
On the other hand, Ishikawa had his quality concepts presented on an Ishikawa diagram. The model illustrated the cause and effect functions of a business that enhance the provision of quality in business through the quality circles of the plan, do, check and act (PDCA) (Besterfield, 2003). This implies that the gurus have been very influential in the enhancement of quality management within the production processes.
The preaching of Feigenbaum is the most ideal for a business organization with a need for total quality management. Under his concepts, Feigenbaum illustrated the need for appropriate leadership, adoption of technology, and quality organization within a business.
Through these ideas, the business can develop and integrate efficient systems that enable the production and service delivery to consumers, at most economical expenses with consideration to their satisfaction (Capezio & Morehouse, 2003). For this reason, a business has to adopt integrated quality development, quality improvement, and quality sustenance. Therefore, a business would be able to meet the needs of the business while promoting quality compared to its competitors in the same business.
Taguchi, one of the influential gurus in quality, has made a significant impact on the industrial statistics. He develops some of the guiding models that ensure production organization was able to prevent the occurrence of defective products within their systems. In this regard, his main contributions were the generation of the loss functions, which guides in the eradication of financial losses emanating from low-quality production.
This entailed the development of off-line quality control systems that would restrict the occurrence of errors in the processing systems to ensure the enhancement of quality. Also, it was essential to consider the need for creativity and innovation in the statistical analysis of experiments within production. His approach to quality management in production organization is similar to the six-sigma approach.
Under the six-sigma approach, productions within an industrial system are regarded to be following two approaches borrowed from Deming’s concept of ‘Plan Do Check and Act’. The approaches include ‘Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control’ (DMAIC) and ‘Define, Measure, Analyze, Design and Verify (DMADV) which guides in the strategic enhancement of quality within a production organization.
The organization mainly uses DMDC to enhance the qualities of current products to meet market needs. For DMADV, the organization adopts it when there is an urge to develop new products, which addresses the anticipated needs of consumers. In this regard, the two approaches to quality management within a production organization are similar and illustrate the need for efficiency and economy of resources used in the production systems.
Based on the urge of Taguchi for the need for resource reduction utilized in production, he elaborates means of reducing parameters causing defectiveness in the systems. This approach is illustrated in the six-sigma approach where the emphasis of quality is illustrated for existing or new products production. All the two approaches signify the need of total quality control (Bendell, 2000).
It is true that the preaching of American quality gurus inspired the Japanese quality gurus. Initially, Dr. Deming, the leading guru of quality in the United States, contributed to quality weapon production in World War II that had a negative impact on Japan. After the war had stopped, he visited Japan where he was to discuss influential themes with the Japan manufacturing leaders and engineers.
On occasion, the Japanese were interested in gaining knowledge and motivations of how they could transform their production from adopters to inventors of the technology. Dr. Deming provided the concepts and approaches to which the Japanese could use to overhaul their whole production processes and lead to quality management production (Imler, 2006). Though the Japanese leaders were pessimistic about the pieces of advice from him, they had to try to disapprove his ideologies.
Over time, he could visit Japan where he guided them to stick to the condition of his philosophies. These immense contributions of Dr. Deming were magnificent and transform the production processes within almost five years. As a result, the Japanese scientists designed a quality prize named after him called the Deming Prize. The prize was awarded to the organization that demonstrated the highest quality performance during ranking.
Since Dr. Deming had made his contributions with regard to quality management in production, other prominent Japanese gurus emerged. The Japanese gurus attempted to borrow the concept of Deming and Stewart to tailor their quality management to fit the Japanese and international standards. As a result, many approaches and models were developed that have guided Japan to be one of the industrialized nations. For this reason, the American gurus motivate the Japanese quality gurus.
References
Bendell, A. (2000). The quality gurus: what can they do for your company?.. London: Dept. of Trade and Industry.
Besterfield, D. H. (2003). Total quality management (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Capezio, P., & Morehouse, D. L. (2003). Taking the mystery out of TQM: a practical guide to total quality management. Hawthorne, N.J.: Career Press.
Imler, K. (2006). Get it right: a guide to strategic quality systems. Milwaukee, Wisc.: ASQ Quality Press.