Abstract: Material control, process control, and containment are keys to successful manufacturing. These elements have helped Motorola, Inc. win the 1988 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Material control occurs in Motorola's certification of suppliers. The goal is to reduce the supplier base by about 50% every year and for suppliers to strive toward a Cpk of 2. The supplier certification program includes yearly audits and statistical process control of critical processes. Process control occurs in three phases: avoidance of going beyond control limits; identification of parameters whose control would lead to Six Sigma quality; and continuous improvement. Engineering and monitor audits are conducted by quality assurance engineers and certified auditors, respectively. Containment removes defects from the production line until corrective action becomes permanent. Sampling, scrapping, and 100% inspection are techniques for containment. Rework is not permitted. The article contains a 20-item audit checklist.
The American Society for Quality can help you learn about quality: how to use time-tested principles and methods to improve the work you do, whatever it may be.
ASQ was born in the days when "quality control" usually meant ensuring that manufactured products were free of defects. Manufacturing is still an important part of what we do, but we've also evolved into much more. Virtually any process can benefit from the quality tools and techniques you’ll find here.
If you're brand new to quality, you've come to the right place.
This section of our Web site will show you the "first steps" to learning about the tools, processes and ideas that comprise quality and how quality can be applied to your work.
Then we'll show you the "next steps" that will help you take quality to the next level and help you get the most out of the resources ASQ has to offer.
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The quality movement can trace its roots back to medieval Europe, where craftsmen began organizing into unions called guilds in the late 13th century.
Until the early 19th century, manufacturing in the industrialized world tended to follow this craftsmanship model. The factory system, with its emphasis on product inspection, started in Great Britain in the mid-1750s and grew into the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s.
In the early 20th century, manufacturers began to include quality processes in quality practices.
After the United States entered World War II, quality became a critical component of the war effort: Bullets manufactured in one state, for example, had to work consistently in rifles made in another. The armed forces initially inspected virtually every unit of product; then to simplify and speed up this process without compromising safety, the military began to use sampling techniques for inspection, aided by the publication of military-specification standards and training courses in Walter Shewhart’s statistical process control techniques.
The birth of total quality in the United States came as a direct response to the quality revolution in Japan following World War II. The Japanese welcomed the input of Americans Joseph M. Juran and W. Edwards Deming and rather than concentrating on inspection, focused on improving all organizational processes through the people who used them.
By the 1970s, U.S. industrial sectors such as automobiles and electronics had been broadsided by Japan’s high-quality competition. The U.S. response, emphasizing not only statistics but approaches that embraced the entire organization, became known as total quality management (TQM).
By the last decade of the 20th century, TQM was considered a fad by many business leaders. But while the use of the term TQM has faded somewhat, particularly in the United States, its practices continue.
In the few years since the turn of the century, the quality movement seems to have matured beyond Total Quality. New quality systems have evolved from the foundations of Deming, Juran and the early Japanese practitioners of quality, and quality has moved beyond manufacturing into service, healthcare, education and government sectors.
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