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)

• Best known for the P-D-C-A cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
• Brought significant improvements to Japanese manufacturing
• Other quality and management philosophies and thoughts from him were - i) The Deming System of Profound Knowledge, ii) The 14 points for Transformation of Management, iii) Seven Deadly Diseases, iv) The PDSA cycle, v) The Red Bead Experiment, and, vi) The Funnel Experiment.

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)

• Contributor of the famous TPS - Toyota Production System, that focused on reducing over-burden,  inconsistency,  and to eliminate waste
• Creator of concepts such as Poka-yoke or mistake-proofing, Zero Quality Control, The SMED system etc

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)

• Introduced the concept of Quality Circles
• Developed the statistical tool - Fishbone Cause and Effect Diagram
• Stressed the importance of an internal customer

8. Armand V. Feigenbaum (1920)

• Devised the Total Quality Control concept
• Innovator in the area of the Quality Cost Management - Costs of prevention, appraisal, and internal and external failure 

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)

• Initiated the Zero Defects concept
• Conceptualized Quality Management Maturity Grid

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.