Quality Evolution

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So, today, we're gonna go into a little bit of history of Quality. How does Quality came to be realized and how does it become a profession and later on, a need in every type of business and corporations. Simply put, let's discover the hidden history of QUALITY EVOLUTION.

wow, so that's a very long stages isn't it? Fret not, I will break it down and explains each of them.

Artisan:

• This is during the era of early manufacturing where blacksmith forge swords one by one and craftsman crafts one by one. Simple said, these individuals (blacksmith and craftsman) is considered as artisan. 
• The manufacturing process during this age is simply base on the design and specifications by the artisans and as they seems fit. There is no quality control at this age yet. 

Inspection:

• During this age, mass production (manufacturing) becomes a need. There's many reasons for that such as war, trading and also collections. 
• Since those reasons have a need for a quality goods and services, inspection was implemented. 
• However, the inspection during this time was done by the artisan himself. For example, the artisan would decide if the sword forged was acceptable or rework needed to be done.
• During this time, no guarantee that the good produce would work without fail and there's no needs for assurances yet.

Quality Control:

• During this era, trading between villages, countries and even continent were expanding exponentially. Hence, some goods were produced in a huge number by a huge number of man power. Unlike before, where only 1 artisan produce the same type of good, this era utilize a few artisans (blacksmiths) to produce multiple (mass) numbers of goods on a continuous base.
• Therefore, these artisans would not have sufficient resources and time to do the inspection for each goods produced. Thus, a career or profession called "inspector / inspection officer" was created.
• The only job for this "inspector" is to determine whether the good is accepted or failed. Sometimes, they would recommend rework for the salvageable failed goods.

Statistical Quality Control:

• Surprisingly, during this era the evolution is done by the Japanese who had recently lost the World War II. There are some sources who said that the Japanese are the one who started to commercialized this concept and other countries then follows the foot steps.
• SQC is basically the same as Quality Control where the manufacturer (producer) produce the good and there's another person (inspector) who would inspect and determine whether the good is fail or accepted. During this age, the term used is Go and No-Go.
• The only differences is that the number of product produced through manufacturing is so huge that it is impossible to inspect all of them one by one. That is because, semi-automatic and automatic machinery have been implemented into manufacturing and thus, production goes until thousands goods per day.
• In order to solve the time-to-inspect problem, SQC utilized sampling techniques (I will further explain this in later posts).
• Simply said, those sampling techniques would only requires to inspect a sample of the production to determine the whole production go / no-go state.
• For example, to determine 1000 goods, the inspector only need to inspect 50 out of the 1000 goods only. This saves a lot of time and resources!

Statistical Process Control:

• The next evolution would solves the problem faced by the manufacturers. Before this, the manufacturer would be responsible for all the cost of failed / re-work products. However, this evolution would emphasize and indulge entirely quality in design stage. 
• This also means that the design of the product would be inspected to make sure it is quality enough. Other than that, quality control would be done on each processes.
• For example, there are 5 process needed to produce plastic bottle such as raw material collection and inspection, melting the plastics, blow molding, assembling added values and inspections. So, there would be inspectors for each 5 process to determine go and no-go state of each product that undergoes that process. 
• By doing so, the manufacturer would be able to minimize the probability of losses and need of reworking after the product is fully assembled. This greatly improves the quality of the product and enhance profits while nearing zero defects.

Total Quality Management:

• The next and latest evolution of quality is the TQM. In this era, quality have been integrated into the managements. Meaning to say, the quality is no longer the design & specification, process or even the inspection. Quality has been integrated to all the staff / management side.
• When TQM has been achieved, all level of managements (top managements, supervisors, hard labour workers even the office staffs) must participate and gave their insight on any discussion. In other word, when TQM has been achieved, every decision will compromise and take into consideration of every departments and levels of the company. Therefore, a concrete and solid decision will be selected which everyone is responsible for and induce motivation as everyone had contributed to the decision making.
• This evolution had eliminated the problem where the decision made before were solely from the top management point of view which usually conform to the customer requirement and lowering cost as low as possible only. Now, with TQM the decision will also take into consideration the opinion of the workers who would assembled it and also the technician who knows best the capabilities of the machinery. 

Continuous Improvement:

• The current trend of evolution would be the every-changing, ever-evolving quality in our daily lives. As such, more and more improvement would be made which varies from industries since almost every companies or sector would have quality department. 
• Therefore, these individuals would create the Innovation and Improvement Circle (ICC) which will bring quality of their company to the next level. Further elaboration for ICC will be told later on. 

Well, that's already quite long isn't it? But believe me, it's not the end yet. This is the simplified version of my own understanding on Quality Evolution. Nevertheless, never stop indulging yourself in quality as it is the world in the future. =D

Thank You for reading! Have a nice day. ^_^