Tauno Kekale and The Quality Gurus
I'd start the history of quality from tolerance thinking. The idea we
take as granted today, the idea that made mass production and inspection
and exchangeability of parts and spare parts possible, was to make parts
similar enough, within a tolerance. I have no knowledge about the
theoretical father of this thinking, but I know that Eli Whitney
(rifles) and Henry Leland (Cadillac automobiles) were among the first
practitioners.
Then there was the testing of products - and note that somewhere much
before this somebody had decided that it is also the producer's
responsibility to test products for their function (ie. quality).
Testing has been affected much by statistical sampling; again,
statistics is not the original idea of Shewhart, but he may well be the
father of statistics in quality control. At least the SPC control
charts, used in monitoring quality during the processes, bear his
signature. The inventors of non-destructive testing are also important -
don't know who has implemented them into industrial use but at least
X-rays and ultrasonic techniques are of interest here.
Then there are the theoretical thinkers. I'd say that quality went
theoretical (the world went, actually) after the world war 2, and if
this wasn't necessary as much the work of the "gurus" that went over to
teach the Japanese (Deming, Juran, Feigenbaum, Drucker etc) it is their
names that are connected to the ideas. The theoreticizing and concepts
might as well have resulted from the need to package things so that they
are easier to teach further to workforce and managers. Anyway, these
"gurus" are the people that have gathered together ideas into packages
and thus created complete quality approaches; many later "names" have
just researched the implementations and the problems connected with it.
The gurus that have affected the quality thinking might well be the
abovementioned four "teachers of the japanese".
One must notice, however, thaat a) the "american gurus" didn't manage to
awaken the americans with their travel-packaged views to quality
management, and b) that many writers today claim the quality revolution
would have happened in Japan and its neighbours anyway. Thus, if we try
to catalogize the gurus of the quality revolution that has flooded us in
form of high-quality, customer-oriented, low-price asian products, the
people that have to be listed are the japanese that have done the
repackaging. Anyway, a japanese worker doesn't talk as much about the
Deming's fourteen points as about the 5-s principle, the seven quality
tools, kaizen etc. The list of gurus that have changed the world should
thus include names such as Genichi Taguchi (of quality loss function,
easy-to-use DoE methodology), Masaaki Imai (kaizen), Shigeo Shingo
(Toyota production method, including the "frontline worker
responsibility"), Kaoru Ishikawa (the cause-and-effect diagram, plus, if
I'm correctly informed, one of the powers that brought the western gurus
to Japan) etc. Again, it's very difficult to say whether these japanese
gurus have invented the concepts and ideas or whether they just are the
first that have written them down.
Then, one group of thinkers that are typically overlooked in the field
of quality - the people that have brought in the voice of the customer,
the service quality gurus. In the seventies, the "nordic school of
service management" including names such as Evert Gummesson, Richard
Norrman, Christian Gronroos and Jarmo Lehtinen have develoiped theories
on differences between customer perceptions and producer quality
measurements and pinpointed the importance of service encounter for
perceived quality. Along the same lines, on the other side of the
Atlantic, the work of A.Parasuraman, Valerie Zeithaml and Leonard Berry
must be acknowledged; they have given us the five-gap model of service
quality and the SERVQUAL tool for quality measurement. If we look at the
Quality Awards schemes of today, it's easy to see that the
customer/stakeholder satisfaction is in their criteria seen to be
perhaps the single most important issue in Total Quality Management -
thus, the work of these thinkers is of profound importance to us.
(Talking of Quality Awards, Robert Camp must be mentioned as the -
arguable - father of benchmarking).
The ISO 9000 and its derivatives in QS 9000 form might be considered to
have an impact and it's difficult to pinpoint one single person behind
them - both are based on military standards (MIL, AQAP) and developed as
committee efforts. Similarly with the quality awards - they are
affecting lots of people in the field of quality, but the people whose
names they bear aren't typically the originators.
Last but not least, the "new gurus". Who are they ? At the moment, as
said earlier, most of the thinkers are doing research and not developing
significant new ideas (my opinion - most of the three-letter methods are
again careful repackagings). There are some areas of research that might
turn up to be of importance, however; the effects of quality management
on the motivation of personnel and personnel management, as studied by
"the UMIST school" (my group name to researchers and writers such as
Stephen Hill, Adrian Wilkinson, Hugh Willmott and Barrie Dale, just to
name a few) might be one of the areas. Another group that to my opinion
has been doing an important work is the one around and including Rhonda
Reger in Maryland, on the theoretical base cognitive problems in quality
work. David Garvin's work is widely recognized and referred to. Sam Ho
in Hong Kong appears to be a force in trying to connect the japanese
methods and ISO 9000-type systems and may well become the father of the
next stage of TQM. The father of the "concept" of TQM, general Bill
Creech of USAF/TAC fame, might also be remembered here although the
research and even business audience don't use the label in same way as
Creech did. And the organizational learning "school", arguably
originated by thinkers such as Chris Argyris and James March and then
popularized by Peter Senge might show up to be one of the most important
fields in quality thinking for the next century.
My two cents - all the opinions are mine, feel free to disagree.
This page was taken from an email from Tauno Kekale to me. I find Tauno's views of quality to be absolutely excellent. This is reprinted here with his permission. All of the thoughts and concepts are his, not mine.
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