Feigenbaum's 40 Steps to Quality Improvement
1. Total quality control may be defined as:
An effective system for integrating the quality‑development, quality‑maintenance, and quality‑improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable marketing, engineering, production, and service at the most economical levels which allow for full customer satisfaction.
2. In the phrase "quality control," the word "quality" does not have the popular meaning of "best" in any absolute sense. It means "best for certain customer requirements." These requirements are the (a) actual use and (b) selling price of the product.
3. In the phrase "quality control," the word "control" represents a management tool with four steps:
a. Setting quality standards
b. Appraising conformance to these standards
c. Acting when the standards are exceeded
d. Planning for improvements in the standards
4. Several quality‑control methods have been carried on in industry for many years. What is new in the modern approach to quality control is (a) the integration of these often uncoordinated activities and an engineered, operating systems framework which places the responsibility for customer‑oriented quality efforts across all the main‑line activities of an enterprise, giving quality organization‑wide impact, and (b) the addition to the time‑tested methods used of the new quality‑control technologies which have been found useful in dealing with and thinking about the increased emphasis upon reliability in product design and precision in parts manufacture.
5. As a major new business strategic area, quality is explicitly structured to contribute to business profitability and positive cash flow. Total‑quality‑control programs are highly cost‑effective because of their results in improved levels of customer satisfaction, reduced operating costs, reduced operating losses and field service costs, and improved utilization of resources.
6. The need for such programs is underscored by changing buyer‑producer relationships and major marketplace demands for quality. These are reflected in mounting product and service liability trends and consumer pressures which impact strongly upon producers. In addition, there are new social and economic demands for more effective materials use and production processes to turn out increasingly technologically based products, new working patterns in factories and offices, and a growing trend toward internationalization of markets.
7. The factors affecting product quality can be divided into two major groupings: (a) the technological, that is, machines, materials, and processes; (b) the human, that is, operators, foremen, and other company personnel. Of these two factors, the human is of greater importance by far.
8. Total quality control is an important aid to the good engineering designs, good manufacturing methods, and conscientious product service activity that have always been required of high‑quality articles.
9. The fundamentals of quality control are basic to any manufacturing process, whether the product is a nuclear reactor, a space vehicle, a consumer durable, or bakery, drug or brewery products. They are equally basic to so‑called service industries, where the product may be an intangible, such as medical care, hotel accommodations, or telephone communications.
Although the approach is somewhat different if the production is job shop rather than large quantity or small components rather than large apparatus, the same fundamentals still obtain. This difference in approach can be readily summarized: In mass‑production manufacturing, quality‑control activities center on the product, whereas in job‑lot manufacturing, they are a matter of controlling the process.
10. Quality control enters into all phases of the industrial production process, starting with the customer's specification and the sale to the customer through design engineering and assembly to shipment of the product and installation and field service for a customer who remains satisfied with the product.
11. Effective control over the factors affecting quality demands controls at all important stages of the production and service processes. These controls can be termed the jobs of quality control, and they fall into four natural classifications:
a. New‑design control
b. Incoming‑material control
c. Product control
d. Special process studies
12. New‑design control involves the establishment and specification of the desirable cost‑quality, performance‑quality, safety‑quality, and reliability‑quality standards for the product, including the elimination or location of possible sources of quality troubles before the start of formal production.
13. Incoming‑material control involves the receiving and stocking, at the most economical levels of quality, of only those parts, materials, and components whose quality conforms to the specification requirements.
14. Product control involves the control of products at the source of production and through field service so that departures from the quality specification can be corrected before defective products are manufactured and proper product service can be maintained in the field.
15. Special process studies involve investigations and tests to locate the causes of defective products so as to improve quality characteristics and implement permanent corrective action.
16. A total quality system may be defined as: The agreed company‑wide and plant‑wide operating work structure, documented in effective, integrated technical and managerial procedures, for guiding the coordinated actions of the people, the machines, and the information of the company and plant in the best and most practical ways to assure customer quality satisfaction and economical costs of quality.
The quality system provides integrated and continuous control to all key activities, making it truly organization‑wide.
17. The details for a quality‑control program must be tailored to fit the needs of individual plants, but certain basic areas of attention are common to most programs for total quality control.
18. The target of the quality program attention is to control product quality throughout the process of design, manufacture, shipment, and service so as to prevent the occurrence of unsatisfactory quality.
19. Benefits often resulting from total quality programs are improvements in product quality and design, reductions in operating costs and losses, improvement in employee morale, and reduction of production‑line bottlenecks. By‑product benefits are improved inspection and test methods, sounder setting of time standards for labor, definite schedules for preventative maintenance, the availability of powerful data for use in company advertising, and the furnishing of a factual basis for cost‑accounting standards for scrap, rework, and inspection.
20. Quality costs are a means for measuring and optimizing total‑quality‑control activities.
21. Operating quality costs are divided into four different classifications:
a. Prevention costs, which include quality planning and other costs associated with preventing nonconformances and defects.
b. Appraisal costs, or the costs incurred in evaluating product quality to maintain established quality levels.
c. Internal failure costs, caused by defective and nonconforming materials and products that do not meet company quality specifications. These include scrap, rework, and spoilage.
d. External failure costs, caused by defective and nonconforming products reaching the customer. They include complaints and in‑warranty product service costs, costs of product recall, court costs, and liability Penalties.
22. Cost reductions‑‑particularly reductions in operating quality costs‑‑result from total quality control for two reasons:
a. Industry has often lacked effective, customer‑oriented quality standards. It has, therefore, often unrealistically tilted the scales in the balance between the cost of quality in a product and the service that the product is to render.
b. An expenditure in the area of prevention can have a several‑fold advantage in reducing costs in the areas of internal failure and external failure. A saving of many dollars for each dollar spent in prevention is often experienced.
23. Organization‑wise, total quality control is management's tool for delegating authority and responsibility for product quality, thus relieving itself of unnecessary detail while retaining the means of assuring that quality results will be satisfactory. There are two basic concepts important in organizing for quality control.
The first is that quality is everybody's job. Every component has quality‑related responsibility, e.g., Marketing for determining customers' quality preferences, Engineering for specifying product quality specifications, and Shop Supervision for building quality into the product.
The second concept is that because quality is everybody's job, it may become nobody's job. Management must recognize that the many individual responsibilities for quality will be exercised most effectively when they are buttressed and serviced by a well‑organized, full‑time, genuinely modern management function whose only areas of operation is (sic) in the quality‑control jobs.
24. While the general manager must, in principle, become the chief designer of the quality program, the general manager and the other major company functions are assisted by an effective, modern, quality‑control function.
25. This quality‑control organizational component has twin objectives: (a) to provide quality assurance for the company's product, i.e., simply to be sure that the products shipped are right and (b) to assist in assuring optimum quality costs for those products. It fulfills these objectives through its three subfunctions: quality engineering, process‑control engineering, and quality information equipment engineering. These quality‑control subfunctions provide basic engineering technologies that are applicable to any product for assuring its right quality at optimum quality cost.
26. Quality engineering contributes to the quality planning which is fundamental to the entire quality‑control program for the company.
27. Process‑control engineering monitors the application of this quality‑control program on the production floor and thus gradually supplants the older policing inspection activity.
28. Quality information equipment engineering designs and develops the inspection and testing equipment for obtaining the necessary quality measurements and controls. Where justified, this equipment is combined with production to provide automatic feedback of results for control of the process. All pertinent results are then analyzed as a basis for adjustment and corrective action on the process.
29. From the human relations point of view, quality‑control organization is both:
a. Channel of communication for product‑quality information among all concerned employees and groups.
b. Means of participation in the overall quality‑control program by these employees and groups.
Quality‑control organization is a means of breaking down the attitude sometimes held by factory operators and functional specialists that "our quality responsibility is so small a part of the whole that we're really not a part of the plant quality‑control program nor are we important to it."
30. Total‑quality‑control programs should be developed carefully within given company. It is often wise to select one or two quality areas, to achieve successful results in attacking them, and to let the program grow step by step in this fashion.
31. Necessary to the success of the quality program in a plant is the very intangible but extremely important spirit of quality‑mindedness, extending from top management right to the men and women at the bench.
32. Whatever may be new about the total‑quality‑control program for a plant must be closely coupled throughout the entire plant organization so as to obtain acceptance and cooperation.
33. A quality‑control program must have the complete support of top management. With lukewarm management support, no amount of selling to the rest of the organization can be genuinely effective.
34. Management must recognize at the outset of its total‑quality‑control program that this program is not a temporary quality improvement or quality cost‑reduction project. Only when the major problems represented by the initial quality improvements and cost reductions are out of the way can the quality‑control program take over its long‑range role of the management control over quality.
35. Statistics are used in an overall‑quality‑control program whenever and wherever they may be useful, but statistics are only one part of the total‑quality‑control pattern; they are not the pattern itself. The five statistical tools that have come to be used in quality‑control activities are:
a. Frequency distributions
b. Control charts
c. Sampling tables
d. Special methods
e. Product reliability
The point of view represented by these statistical methods has, however, had a profound effect upon the entire area of total‑quality‑control.
36. The statistical point of view in total‑quality‑control resolves essentially into this: Variation in product quality must be constantly studied‑‑within batches of product, on processing equipment, between different lots of the same article, on critical quality characteristics and standards. This variation may best be studied by the analysis of samples selected from the lots of product or from units produced by the processing equipment. The development of advanced electronic and mechanical test equipment has provided basic improvement in the approach to this task.
37. The demands of total quality control are increased by automation of the manufacturing process. With automatic equipment, higher quality levels of parts sometimes are necessary for trouble‑free operation. In fact, until higher quality levels are attained, excessive down time may make operation of the automated process uneconomic. Rapid detection of out‑of‑control conditions, feedback for process adjustment, and quick response of the process to correction are essential to low defect and nonconformance rates.
38. An important feature of a total quality program is that it controls quality at the source. An example is its positive effect in stimulating and building up operator responsibility for, and interest in, product quality through measurements taken by the operator at the station.
39. Product reliability is, in effect, "product function over the product life expectancy time." It is a part of the balanced total product‑quality requirement‑‑just as are appearance, maintainability, serviceability, supportability, and so on‑‑and hence cannot be treated separately from total quality control.
40. The total quality program provides the discipline methodology, and techniques to assure consistently high product quality in the four basic jobs of:
a. New‑design control
b. Incoming‑material control
c. Product control
d. Special process studies
It coordinates the efforts of the people, the machines, and the information which are basic to total‑quality‑control to provide high customer quality satisfaction which brings competitive advantage to the company.
Quality is, in its essence, a way of managing. And total‑quality‑control's organization‑wide impact involves the managerial and technical implementation of customer‑oriented quality activities as a prime responsibility of general management and of the mainline operations of marketing, engineering, production, industrial relations, finance, and service as well as of the quality‑control function itself at the most economical levels which provide customer satisfaction.
[Source: Federal Total Quality Management Handbook, Appendix 1A: "How to Get Started." June 1990]