From quality to excellence

Before the industrial revolution the industry was run by skilled craftsmen, who understood and appreciated the customers’ expectation of quality and delivered the same through their skills and art. They took pride in their work having customers’ delight as their only goal. They built quality in their work and products both as manufacturers and inspectors. The social system during those times was responsible for this behaviour as it valued quality of products and services delivered through ethical practices. With the advent of mechanization the thrust soon shifted to speed and volumes from craft and art.

Fredrick W Taylor’s concept of “scientific management” greatly influenced the nature of quality in manufacturing organizations from early twentieth century onwards. Basic elements of scientific management were time and motion study and standardization of practices. Planning was construed as a higher level job and so was separated from execution of the job. One unforeseen consequence of separating planning (developing scientific way of conducting work, setting targets and rewards, breaking the work and allocation of tasks and developing competencies to carry out the work) from “real work” was the suppression of creativity and initiation of the worker – whose motivation was limited to monitory incentives. To ensure that products were manufactured correctly, independent “quality control” departments assumed the tasks of inspection thus formalising the separation of manufacturing and quality assurance. Quality had assumed the meaning of differentiating “good from bad” product.

Statistics as quality tool gained prominence during 1930s and a scientific approach for product quality was adopted when Walter A Schewart advocated SQC techniques. Quality evolved as a precise and measurable variable – quantitative measure of an attribute of product or service. Quality was regarded as conformance to specifications and standards.

No discussion on historical perspective of quality is complete without the mention of contribution of “quality experts”, such as, Deming, Juran and Crosby. Their philosophy and insights on quality has had profound impact on industry and a generation of practitioners. Deming’s philosophy had more to do with quality of management system rather than the quality of products and has never defined quality precisely, whereas Juran defined quality as “fitness for use” and Crosby defined quality as “conformance to requirements, not elegance”.

“Fitness for use” and “conformance to requirements” was interpreted as conformance to standards and this views of quality helped industry significantly in measuring and improving product quality. But as ever growing number of competitors understood this secret of quality, product quality soon lost its importance for industry as source of differentiation. Industry began to look beyond the customer needs of product quality and price.

Gaining insights into value proposition for the customers and providing ever increasing value to the customers is now being seen as the only way of ensuring sustained success in the marketplace. Industry realised that ability to deliver what customer genuinely value today ultimately depends upon the internal processes and procedures of the company. The key to change in the systems is not merely a technical matter but rather of organizational culture too. And to identify factors that would affect the customers’ perceptions in future and how a company can continue to deliver on future value drivers in the market place requires well established systems to proactively sense and respond to the changes in environment.

The understanding of quality shifted from measuring product quality to measuring and improving the management systems by focusing on the determinants of customer value like processes, culture, futuristic thinking, innovation, commitment of people, information quality, and collaborative relationships etc. This movement of ensuring quality, not only of products, but also of management systems is more popularly known as Total Quality Management (TQM) or more recently as business excellence or performance excellence – best practices driving great results.