Quality and Quality Management
There has always been major interest in the area of software development is “quality”. Basicly, quality is the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.
I just want to deal with the history of quality and quality management in this story. I’m going to cover software quality later.
1 History of Quality
There is no common definition of quality for everyone. Because, quality has multidimensional architecture according to related area. According to this fact quality has many meanings. These are; “Ranging from luxury and merit to excellence, good value for money or convenience and even practicality. It is often defined simply as ‘fitness for purpose’. Quality is a multi-faceted concept; different dimensions of quality will be important to different users.”
People started to interest quality at archaic times with their conditions and properties. But, modern quality approach is seen in 20 th century with United States of America. The first quality control charts can be seen in 1920’s. After 1930’s, some quality control standards were prepared according to the statistical techniques to identify quality of the product. Then, United States of America introduces the “War Standards” to world as a quality standards guide in 1941. After the quality guide produced, new quality standards were started to use by industry. Japanese people were interested in quality after the 2 nd World War. They understood the importance of the quality control and got some conferences from quality professionals. We meet a new concept that quality of production process in those conferences.
After that, total quality control techniques that include both quality of product and production process are developed. Total quality control techniques were used widely by companies. An idea that “no errors on production” was rose in 1960’s. Japanese were successful while integrating the quality control circles to management system. Therefore, the idea of quality management was born.
Quality management techniques were used by lots of companies and after a practice period it served two alternative production strategies to managers. These strategies are “Low Cost” and “High Quality”. Development period of the quality management were continued in 1970’s till de beginning of the 1980’s. These years were called rivalry years because of companies’ management strategies. In addition to this, standardization was getting important for every industrial sector. At last, we introduced to International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
A lot of countries in the world are member of this organisation. Series of standards were identified by ISO. The first series of standards called ISO-9000.
These standards guarantee quality assurance for production sectors. New product or production standards are adding these series of standards or some standards are updated if it necessary according to the technological improvements.
In short, United States of America and Japan are very important on evolution of quality and quality based techniques. There are lots of quality standards and quality management techniques for each sector due to their successful researches and practices.
2 Quality Measurement
As everyone knows, there are quality standards defined by national and international organisations. Production processes and products are classified according to the related standards. Therefore, we can say quality is a measurable quantity. If it is measurable quantity, there are some questions to ask such as “What are dimensions of quality?” and “What is quality management?”
2.1 What are dimensions of Quality?
Quality is measurable quantity on some dimensions. There are six different dimensions quality measurement lies on. These dimensions are;
All of these dimensions are used to identify product’s quality. Product supplies all of customer’s requirements and needs to be relevant. If it does not satisfy customer’s expectation, the product’s quality is bad on relevance dimensions.
Products must supply right outputs according to the inputs. If they cannot supply any output or wrong output, accuracy dimension of that product quality is bad.
Products must be delivered to customers on time that scheduled before. In generally, the timeliness dimension of quality is related with producers’ process quality. If a customer cannot reach the product when necessary conditions provided, the quality on accessibility dimension is bad. The product can be comparable with other products. If it cannot compare to others, it may not demand on customers.
At last, a product must be consistent in every condition. If products’ output changes with same inputs, system cannot be consistent. Therefore, coherence dimension of the product quality is evaluated in bad way.
2.2 What is quality management?
Quality management is a method for ensuring that all the activities necessary to design, develop and implement a product or service are effective and efficient with respect to the system and its performance.
Quality management concept can be defined as total product or service quality. It includes quality control mechanisms. Therefore the major purpose of the quality management is to offer the goods and services that compatible with customer requirements. The main objectives of the quality management can be summarized with three items.
Offer the products and services that will satisfy the requirements of the customer
Provide higher profitability for the company with measures that improve working procedures, less errors, lower costs, less debts and better orders
Helping the employees fully use their potentials to reach the company goals; to encourage the spread of the company policy, and volunteer activities.
These objectives are very important. If your product or service satisfies all of the customers’ requirements, you and your company can gain confidence of the customers. It is obvious that to do these objectives, company must have an effective leader that possesses the necessary capabilities. This leader is responsible to control their products on all of quality dimensions.
As a result, quality management is method of supplying products or services that satisfies customers’ requirements. The main purpose of the quality management is achieving customer satisfaction.
References;
Basic Concepts (n.d) Retrieved July 26, 2008 from
http://www.asq.org/glossary/q.html
Methodology-quality? (March 12, 2004) Retrieved July 27, 2008 from
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/about/data/methodology/quality/projects/what_is_quality.asp
Quality Management,(n.d) Retrieved October 01, 2008 from
