Quality management gurus

The top experts in quality management are Deming, Juran, and Crosby. Deming promoted statistical quality control and acting in accordance with user requirements. He defined quality as having no flaws or little variation. Deming held the view that success can only be attained if the quality, cost, and productivity are all improved. Deming outlined the PDCA cycle (Plan, Do Check, Act). Quality was defined by Juran as being fit for use when the customer has faith in the product's availability, design, safety, conformity, and field use. Three points are emphasized by Juran: management-led planning, measurement and control, and improvement. According to him, quality will only pay for itself up to a point before prices start to grow. Crosby's philosophy is by four pillars; the zero defects on performance standards, quality as conforming to the requirements, the system of quality as the prevention, and the measurement is reporting quality (Jacobs & Chase, 2014). According to him, quality is free i.e. high quality is due to low cost of correcting defects afterward and that perfection increases productivity (Jacobs & Chase, 2014).

Sigma six is a process which focuses on helping organizations to produce products close to perfect by reducing variation using statistical methods which lower defect rates to less than 3.4 defects per million products. Its methodologies, DMAIC, improve a process that is below specifications while DMADV is a new process (Gopalakrishnan, 2013). ISO 9000 are international standards identifying the minimum required activities a company must do to maintain quality. Lean manufacturing involves activities and techniques aimed at improvement of speed of processes through elimination and reduction of non-value adding steps from a business.



The next aspect in this paper is fishbone diagram which is a way of identifying the causes of a given problem and its effect (cause and effect diagram). When complete, it takes the shape of a fish called the fishbone diagram. The head of the fish represents the biggest problem. The team draws a horizontal line drawn from the head and the vertical lines represent the possible roots of the major issue. A team of professionals discusses the reason of the stated causes as they branch of the upper stem. It's complete when professionals cannot add any other branch. Causes regarded to be more important are placed close to the head (Lighter & Douglas, 2000).

House of quality is an analysis tool of the voice of a customer to translate the customers wants either products or the services that satisfy the needs of the client. The tool represents the steps an organization is supposed to take to satisfy its customer. The competitive section shows the customers view, roof indicates how requirement interact with each other, ceiling stands for the technical requirements and design features and left side holds for the customers need (Lighter & Douglas, 2000).

The other concept is needs analysis or needs assessment, and it is a process that tries to identify as well as evaluate needs of a given group of people or community through some steps. The identification step deals with understanding the problem and finding its future solution.

FMEA is a series of steps to discover the shortcomings in the product or process. Failure modes refer to the different ways which can cause a process to fail. The effects are how the failures can cause waste or negatives results to the customer. Effect analysis is the study of the impacts of those failures. Its aim is to reduce or eliminate failures starting with the one that is of highest priority (Tagues, 2004).

SERVQUAL is a research tool which has many dimensions all aimed at getting the customers’ expectations and perceptions. Its five dimensions include tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy.

The last phrase defined in this literature review is a decision tree which is the type of a tree graph that uses the branching method to show outcomes or consequences of any decision made. They are mostly used in research operations to make decisions in a group of people.



References

Gopalakrishnan, N. ( 2013). Simplified Six Sigma: methodology, tools, and implementation. Delhi: PHI Learning.

Jacobs, F. R., & Chase, R. B. (2014). Operations and supply chain management (14 ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Lighter, D. E., & Douglas, C. (2000). Principles and methods of quality management in health care. Gaithersburg, Md: Aspen Publishers.

Tagues, N. R. (2004). The Quality Toolbox, Second Edition. United States: ASQ Quality Press.