Critically review how the management of quality has changed over the last century - Essay Example

"With the creation of this new department, there came new services and issues, e.g. standards, training, recording of data and the accuracy of measuring equipment" (the UK Government Department of Quality and Industry 2005). It is obvious that the duties of this "chief inspector" were laying in something more than just an acceptance of goods. Thus a defect prevention practice appeared to be required. The 1920s was the period when statistical methods efficiently merged into quality control practice, and it was in 1924 when Shewhart created the first outline of a timely chart for quality control.

Thus his investigations and the work of the followers of this practice represented a great amount of what involved the up-to-date theory of statistical process control. Nevertheless this practice was hardly applied in manufacturing companies until the late 1940s (Ackoff 1993). It is well known that it was the time when industrial system of Japan was actually collapsed, and it was infamously well-known because of cheap counterfeit of goods and an ignorant illiterate labor force. Fortunately the Japanese identified these problems and entered upon solving them in time (Connor 1997).

In the beginning of the 1950s quality management quickly occupied a fitting place in Japanese manufacturing business and came into essential play in management philosophy of Japan in such a way that by the 1960s quality management had taken a place of national bias. As a result by the end of 1960s Japan's imports in Europe and the USA surged noticeably, first of all "because of its cheaper, higher quality products, compared to the Western counterparts" (Dooyoung, S., Kalinowski J. G. & El-Enein, G. A. 1998).

In 1969 the first cross-border conference on quality control management supported by Japan, The USA and Europe was carried out in Tokyo. A mind appeared that quality control management in Japan even differ from that one in other countries as it was "company wide quality control" with all the working team from a worker to the top manager taking considerable part in the process (The UK Government Department of Quality and Industry 2005).This type of management characterized Japanese companies by the end of the1970s.

Although supporting of this tendency in the West began later, nearly in the 1980s, when western companies proposed their own quality policies, concepts and ideas in order to compete and overtake Japan. "Total quality management (TQM) became the centre of these drives in most cases" (Giroux, H. & Landry, S. 1998).In the light of intensive global