Managerial thoughts

The quality has been one of the most important factors behind innovation, renovation and restructuration that the company management has implemented to face the events and crises that the global industry has passed through during and after the Second World War. This period is, in my point of view, the best landmark to describe how quality has been the source of innovations and improvements in the industry performance.

In fact, it is in the fires of the Second World War that the United States has introduced new manufacturing processes and new techniques of quality control to produce advanced and reliable military equipment, able to fully meet the needs of their armies in the battlefield.

During this period, sampling techniques have appeared in the quality control of serials products. These techniques have allowed the American industry to deliver products to the American soldiers with high quality at very low cost.

In addition to the sampling techniques, other concepts have emerged during the Second World War, when the US industry has faced with a shortage of raw materials that the world has known at that time.  The U.S. industry began to research materials substitution. The results of this substitution allowed the American industrialists to fortuitously reduce the product costs without affecting the quality required by their users.

Lawrence Delos Miles, an engineer at General Electric, took advantage of the success of that raw material substitution to develop the concept of Value Engineering. He discovered that the most important in a product, is the function it performs whatever the solution used to get it. This discovery evolved into a method of optimizing a product, service or processes. This new concept titled Function Analysis became one of the eight key elements in the value analysis. You convert your product, service or process into functions and you ask yourself what this function does. When the function bring no add value, eliminate it. This is the best way to reduce cost of the product and to keep only the functions of the product for which it is intended. It’s is one of the W. Edward Deming’s principles which states that the quality is not expensive, but leads the costs. Like many other methods, the value analysis was developed in the United States, but Japan has improved it, before being exported again to Europe.

How the success of the US industry has stimulated the Japanese industry

The Japanese experience is still present in our minds. Their products were in the 50’s (after the war world end), synonyms of poor quality. Aware about the large quality gap between their products and American products, the Japanese management has undertaken actions to reduce this gap. After 15 years of actions, the quality of the Japanese products has exceeded in many cases the quality of American products. During that period, the Japanese have organized several missions in the United States to soak, analyze, understand and learn the methods and modes of operation and management of U.S. companies. They also invited American quality experts to Japan to teach the Japanese the quality and the organization methods. The most known of those experts is W. Edward Deming who has developed basic principles and ideas about quality that the Japanese managers have implemented to improve the efficiency of their organizations. One of these famous principles is that the quality problems are not caused by workers, but by the systems in place.  The Asian mentality helping, the Japanese managers came with a new vision of management based particularly on participation. They have mobilized the workers (operators and Managers) of their companies around these key principles and ideas to face the quality challenge..... You want more about this article click here:  How-to-implement-an-efficient-Quality-Management-System---1.pdf