History and Evolution in Quality Management (QM)

The quality movement started with Shewhart control charts in the 1940s. But quality has always been present in our historical monuments, artwork, and literature. There are various aspects of quality such as consumer’s viewpoint of quality, producer’s viewpoint of quality, personal quality, behavioral quality, quality practices, and other tools. Reliability, education, training, teamwork, and management communication are other important aspects which are also included in quality discussions. Overall demand for most of the goods and services has been on the increase, year after year. Due to rise in the purchasing power of people, effective demand for many products and services has also been ever increasing. In many areas there is also scarcity of goods and services. Present-day consumer or the customer is better informed and enlightened. He is no longer prepared to accept things on their trace value or to take things for granted thanks to spread of general education and awareness, mass media, TV, radio, and other marketing and publicity techniques. He wants genuine return for the money he is prepared to part with. Consumers, today, have a wide variety of products and attractive to choose from among. People are interested in a better alternative of value and worth, for the money they are prepared to expend, rather than to compromise with cheap substitutes or products of inferior quality and standard. After the ravages of World War II, Japan was obsessed with the desire to rebuild the nation on the ashes of the war in general and of Hiroshima in particular. It was keenly felt by the Japanese that experts were the only hope for putting their tattered economy back on its feet. For this, they also realized that they must wipe out their earlier reputation for producing cheap and shoddy goods if at all they hope to find a place for their products in the international markets.