Changing Face of Quality

Author: M Rama Krishna

Bankruptcy of GM, Chrysler, Visteon, Metaldyne, Delphi, declaration of losses by Ford, and Toyota are impending symptoms of a major turning point in the quality movement, which primarily was transfigured by the automotive sector. The bankruptcy of 100-year old General Motors is biggest in the manufacturing sector. Visteon, won five star rating from Hyundai, filed bankruptcy during Apr’09. Visteon also received supplier of the year award from GM, Best Quality Award from Toyota, and Excellence award from Ford. After winning ‘Shingo Prize’ – considered as noble prize for manufacturing excellence – for 10 plants, Delphi went bankrupt in 2005.

The quality movement which has strong roots in the teachings of Deming, Juran, Crosby, Taguchi, Shewhart, Ishikawa, etc provided us application oriented tools such as TPM, 5S, Lean, 3M, JIT, Six-Sigma, Kanban, Kaizen to name a few. Historically, quality travelled from end-product testing during 1900s, to Statistical Process Control in 1930s, and finally to continual improvement through systems approach. Rise of mass production, and need for the interchangeable parts created a demand for formal quality inspection. During the first half of the 20th century, final product inspection only was the primary means of quality control. For the quality movement, 1931 was considered as watershed year, when Walter Shewhart was credited with developing control charts. For the first time Statistics was used in preventing defects.

During 1950s, ‘made in Japan’ tag was associated with cheap and inferior products in US. To learn quality from Edward Deming, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) invited him in July 1950, to give lectures on Quality Control. He gave continuously eight day lectures, followed by one-day top management appreciation program. The royalties from the transcripts of his lectures was generously donated to JUSE. The then managing director of JUSE, Kenichi Koyanagi proposed to use these royalties to institute Deming Prize, and it was accepted by the board. In 1951, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) instituted the Deming Application Prize to reward companies which meet stringent criteria for quality management systems. Sundaram-Clayton was the first Indian Company to win Deming Application Prize in 1998.

By 1970’s, Japan penetrated into US market vigorously with higher quality products. With a purpose to help American companies to improve quality and productivity, in line with Deming Prize, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) was instituted in 1988. During the same time in 1987, ISO released its first edition of international standard on Quality Management System based on PDCA model.

In 1991, with the efforts of 14 European companies, a Business Excellence Model was developed, as an answer to Deming Prize in Japan, and MBNQA in USA. Utmost importance given to quality during that time in the words of European Community president was “the battle for quality is one of the prerequisites for the success of your companies and for our competitive success.”

Subsequent to liberalization, Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), and Export Import (Exim) Bank together developed CII-Exim Bank Award model to enhance the competitiveness of India Inc. This model is based on EFQM. Indian Merchant Chambers developed IMC-Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award in 1996, based on MBNQA.

With the advent of these Excellence Models, quality has travelled from labs to boardrooms, and graduated from operational level to strategic level. Quality metrics earned a place on CEO’s dashboard. Now, quality is talked at enterprise level. Any failure in product, process, or system is squarely attributed to quality function failure. At present, quality is facing a bitter criticism from all corners of the Industry. This is not the first time that quality is being criticised. Florida Power & Light (FPL) first non-Japanese company to win Deming Application Prize in 1989, almost went bankrupt shortly thereafter, quality was condemned. Wallace Co., Inc filed for Chaper-11 bankruptcy, shortly after winning MBNQA in 1990, quality was viewed as a joke. In India, though there were no cases published, Satyam Computers is one glaring example. The sustainability award won by Satyam was taken back immediately after declaration of accounting irregularities. Satyam was also a winner of IMC Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award in 2001.

Learning from introspection quality has already started inching toward ‘clean & green’ from ‘lean and mean’. The official websites of ISO, ASQ indicate this trend towards sustainability. The Critical To Quality (CTQ) metric is broadening its scope to transform to Critical To Sustainability (CTS) metric. The role of quality function is being refocused to include the stakeholder engagement in place of customer engagement.