Re: REQUEST: 21st Century Quality Concepts

["William J. Latzko" <latzko@worldnet.att.net>]

At 07:35 AM 7/20/2000 -0400, Fatos PAKDIL wrote:

>I am a doctorate student about business. My interest areas are total 
>quality management, strategic management, service quality and performance 
>management.
>
>I intend to make an innovative thesis about total quality management. 
>Today, I have to determine my Ph.D thesis subject and for this reason, I 
>am making a search in quality world about this question :
>
>"According to your opinion what is the newest and most important concepts 
>in total quality area and what will be the 21th century's quality concept?"

There is a movement in the United States and Europe away from process 
control to problem solving. In addition, there is a regrettable reversion 
to the old inspection systems of the last century.

Starting with the Quality Control Circle movement in this country about 
1970's, the emphasis became solving operational problems. The 
Re-Engineering movement and similar concepts looked towards the improvement 
of output by applying problem solving methods that had its origin with Dr. 
Joseph Juran and were popularized by Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa. While these 
methods are valid when used properly they can result in tampering when used 
improperly. The difference is whether Control Charts are applied or not. 
With Control Charts one knows whether the process is stable or has special 
causes of variation present. The approach in each case differs. if one 
applies the wrong approach, the result is tampering with the process. this 
frequently makes the process worse.

The Six Sigma movement started out on the wrong premise but came up with a 
good solution all the same. It used the control chart initially. There are 
people today who practice this art and who demur using the control chart or 
any statistical tools. They still call themselves "black belts" even though 
this originally meant one who understood statistical thinking and the use 
of control charts.

A throwback to the days of inspection is the ISO 9000 concept, even the 
latest update. Using Frederick Taylor's concepts of documentation and 
holding workers to the documented tasks, this process thrives on inspection 
to see that the documented methods are followed. This was the method also 
used by the logothethes of the Byzantine Empire in the first millennium.

The ISO 9000 process is not bad if it is understood that it is a starter 
set for a firm that had nothing before. Often, the blind adherence to the 
documented procedure does not improve the product but raises costs. The 
subsection that requires corrective action is often interpreted that any 
deviation from the norm prescribed in the procedure must be corrected 
whether it was a special cause or not. This is a recipe for tampering. In 
fact, as I understand it, the subsection requires the corrective action 
only on special causes.

One hundred years is a long time to look into the future. Who in 1900 would 
have foreseen the use of control charts, problem solving tools, etc. that 
we have today. All that I can speculate is that the trend to use automation 
(personal computers) will extent the usefulness of existing methods. New 
methods may evolve as we are liberated from the slavery of computation. The 
danger in this is that the further removed from the theory and computation 
we become, the more likely we are to forget why we used the methods in the 
first place. This results in the misuse of otherwise good tools.

I guess I could have made this shorter by simply saying that there is no 
substitute for knowledge, especially Profound Knowledge.

Bill Latzko

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William J. Latzko                              Voice: 201-868-5338
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