Perform Verification Experiment and Plan Future Action: Confirm results through additional tests, ensuring reliability, and plan future improvements as needed.
A system for designing, producing, and delivering products and services to satisfy customer needs has been well established since the 1950s, with several models for organizing such a system proposed.
A quality system is a structured framework for consistent high-quality product or service delivery, emerging during the Industrial Revolution, replacing individual craftsmanship.
Quality systems transitioned from simple control to engineering and systems engineering, with statistical control methods advanced by Deming and quality management focused on by Juran.
Quality control is the activity of monitoring production activities to ensure that they are producing the correct product or service according to plan.
Dr. Armand V. Feigenbaum identified four “jobs” (Feigenbaum 1983, 64) that were necessary for assuring quality in products: New Design Control, Product Design Control, Product Design Review, and Product Design Verification.
Dr. Armand V. Feigenbaum received a bachelor’s degree from Union College, Schenectady, New York, and his MS and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Key concepts of quality systems include assessing productivity, product quality, and operational efficiency, with quality professionals vital for ensuring consistent quality and customer satisfaction.
The modern approach to producing needs a call for creating a quality system wherein the responsibilities for various aspects of meeting customer needs are identified and assigned to the various agencies in the system.
In recognition of his contribution to the growth of a quality culture in their land, the Japanese instituted a prize, called the Deming Prize, to be awarded to corporations that achieve excellence in product quality, or to individuals who make an outstanding contribution to statistical theory or its application.
In 1960, Emperor Hirohito awarded Dr. Deming the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Second Class—the highest honor bestowed by the emperor on a non-Japanese person.
In 1947, Dr. Deming went to Japan at the invitation of General McArthur’s administration, the occupying forces, to help the Japanese in their census work to evaluate the extent of rehabilitation and reconstruction work needed there.
Dr. Deming later offered the same set of guidelines, with some minor modifications, in his book Out of the Crisis as the recipe for American managers to confront the enormous competition posed by foreign manufacturers in the 1980s.
During the 1980s, Dr. Deming brought home to the American industry the lessons of quality he had helped the Japanese to learn, and participated in the quality revolution that was to unfold within U.S. industry.
Dr. Deming returned to Japan in 1950, at the invitation of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), to assist the organization in spreading knowledge of statistical quality control within Japanese industry.
Dr. Deming spent a year studying statistical theory in London with Sir Ronald A. Fisher, the famous statistician who invented the methods of experimental design.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the guru who taught the Japanese how to organize and manage a system for quality, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on October 14, 1900, and lived most of his early life in Wyoming.
Dr. Deming earned a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Wyoming at Laramie in 1921, and later a master’s degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Dr. Deming was employed after graduate school by one of the laboratories of the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., and as part of his activities there, he organized lectures in statistics at the Graduate School of the Department of Agriculture.
Dr. Deming also participated in using sampling techniques to evaluate and improve the accuracy of entering and tallying data at the Census Bureau during the 1940 Census.