Sunday, December 1, 2013

Remembering the Great Leaders of Quality

This article is a tribute to the 10 greatest leaders of quality and a brief snapshot of their key contribution towards quality.     

1. Edward Deming (1900 to 1993)
2. Joseph Moses Juran (1904 to 2008)
  • First to apply Pareto principle to Quality Management
  • First to add Human Dimension to Quality Management
  • First to write about Cost of Poor Quality (later popularized by James Harrington of IBM)
  • The Juran Trilogy, an approach to cross-functional management - The three managerial processes: quality planning, quality control and quality improvement
  • Brought various Japanese quality principles (example: Quality Circles) to the US
3. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 to 1915)
  • Father of Scientific Management and Efficiency Movement
  • Early proponent of benchmarking and business process re-design
  • Scientific management theory helped the upcoming of Total Quality Control and Re-engineering
4.  Shigeo Shingo (1909 to 1990)
5. Taiichi Ohno (1912 to 1990)
  • Father of TPS - Toyota Production System which later became Lean Manufacturing
  • Devised the 7 wastes (muda in Japanese) in Lean
  • Proponent of JIT - Just-In-Time system
  • Developed the Kanban concept
6.  Sakichi Toyoda (1867 to 1930)
  • Implemented automation (Jidoka in Japanese)
  • Developed the root cause analysis technique, 5-Whys
7. Kaoru Ishikawa (1915 to 1989)
8. Armand V. Feigenbaum (1920)
9. Genichi Taguchi (1924 to 2012)
  • Applied statistics to improve the quality of manufactured good - through famous Taguchi Methods
  • Researched further on design of experiments
  • Contributed towards fields such as product design and manufacturing, such as sales process engineering
10.  Philip B Crosby (1926 to 2001)

I believe that these godfathers of quality have provided significant contributions for the mankind to live a high-quality life. 

Remembering them and sharing their key contributions, I trust, is a great way to celebrate the World Quality Month.

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