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Source: ASQ - The History of Quality
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.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 July 2007 )
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Source: ASQ - The History of Quality
From the end of the 13th century to the early 19th century,
craftsmen across medieval Europe were organized into unions called
guilds. These guilds were responsible for developing strict rules for
product and service quality. Inspection committees enforced the rules
by marking flawless goods with a special mark or symbol.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 July 2007 )
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Source: ASQ - The History of Quality
American quality practices evolved in the 1800s as they were shaped by changes in predominant production methods:
- Craftsmanship
- The factory system
- The Taylor system
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 July 2007 )
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Source: ASQ - The History of Quality
The beginning of the 20th century marked the inclusion of “processes” in quality practices.
A
“process” is defined as a group of activities that takes an input, adds
value to it and provides an output, such as when a chef transforms a
pile of ingredients into a meal.
Walter Shewhart,
a statistician for Bell Laboratories, began to focus on controlling
processes in the mid-1920s, making quality relevant not only for the
finished product but for the processes that created it.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 July 2007 )
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Source: ASQ - The History of Quality
The birth of total quality in the United States was in direct
response to a quality revolution in Japan following World War II, as
major Japanese manufacturers converted from producing military goods
for internal use to producing civilian goods for trade.
At
first, Japan had a widely held reputation for shoddy exports, and their
goods were shunned by international markets. This led Japanese
organizations to explore new ways of thinking about quality.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 July 2007 )
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Source: ASQ - The History of Quality
By the end of the 1990s Total Quality Management (TQM) was
considered little more than a fad by many American business leaders
(although it still retained its prominence in Europe).
While
use of the term TQM has faded somewhat, particularly in the United
States, quality expert Nancy Tague says: “Enough organizations have
used it with success that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of its
death have been greatly exaggerated.” (see The Quality Toolbox, ASQ Quality Press, 2005).
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 July 2007 )
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