Armand Feigenbaum
Armand Feigenbaum is the originator of
Total Quality Control.
Armand Vallin Feigenbaum (born 1922) is an American quality control
expert and businessman. He devised the concept of Total Quality Control,
later known as Total Quality Management (TQM).
Feigenbaum received a bachelor's degree from Union College, and his
master's degree and Ph.D. from MIT. He was Director of Manufacturing
Operations at General Electric (1958-1968), and is now President and CEO
of General Systems Company of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, an engineering
firm that designs and installs operational systems. Feigenbaum wrote
several books and served as President of the American Society for
Quality (1961-1963).
His contributions to the quality body of knowledge include:
* "Total quality control is an effective system for integrating the
quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement
efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable
production and service at the most economical levels which allow full
customer satisfaction."
* The concept of a "hidden" plant�the idea that so much extra work
is performed in correcting mistakes that there is effectively a hidden
plant within any factory.
* Accountability for quality: Because quality is everybody's job, it
may become nobody's job�the idea that quality must be actively managed
and have visibility at the highest levels of management.
Awards and Honours of
Armand Feigenbaum
* First recipient of
ASQ's Lancaster Award
* ASQ 1965 Edwards Medal in recognition of "his origination and
implementation of basic foundations for modern quality control"
* National Security Industrial Association Award of Merit
* Member of the Advisory Group of the U.S. Army
* Chairman of a system-wide evaluation of quality assurance
activities of the Army Materiel Command
* Consultant with the Industrial College of the Armed Forces
* Union College Founders Medal
* Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
* Life member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers
* Life member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Armand Feigenbaum
Armand Feigenbaum is the
originator of Total Quality Control. He sees quality control as a
business method rather than technically, and believes that quality has
become the single most important force leading to organisational success
and growth.
Dr Armand V Feigenbaum is the originator of Total Quality Control. The
first edition of his book Total Quality Control was completed whilst he
was still a doctoral student at MIT.
In his book Quality Control: Principles, Practices and Administration,
Feigenbaum strove to move away from the then primary concern with
technical methods of quality control, to quality control as a business
method. Thus he emphasised the administrative viewpoint and considered
human relations as a basic issue in quality control activities.
Individual methods, such as statistics or preventive maintenance, are
seen as only segments of a comprehensive quality control programme.
Quality control itself is defined as:
'An effective system for co-ordinating the quality maintenance and
quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organisation so
as to enable production at the most economical levels which allow for
full customer satisfaction.'
Armand Feigenbaum stresses that quality does not mean best but best for
the customer use and selling price. The word control in quality control
represents a management tool with 4 steps:
-
Setting quality
standards
-
Appraising conformance
to these standards
-
Acting when standards
are exceeded
-
Planning for
improvements in the standards.
Quality control is seen as entering into all phases of the industrial
production process, from customer specification and sale through design,
engineering and assembly, and ending with shipment of product to a
customer who is happy with it. Effective control over the factors
affecting product quality is regarded as requiring controls at all
important stages of the production process. These controls or jobs of
quality control can be classified as:
Quality is seen as having become the single most important force leading
to organisational success and company growth in national and
international markets. Further, it is argued that:
Quality is in its essence a way of managing the organisation and that,
like finance and marketing, quality has now become an essential element
of modern management.
Thus a Total Quality System is defined as:
The agreed company-wide and plantwide operating work structure,
documented in effective, integrated technical and managerial procedures,
for guiding the co-ordinated actions of the people, the machines and the
information of the company and plant in the best and most practical ways
to assure customer quality satisfaction and economical costs of quality.
Operating quality costs are divided into:
-
Prevention costs
including quality planning.
-
Appraisal costs
including inspection.
-
Internal failure costs
including scrap and rework.
-
External failure costs
including warranty costs, complaints etc.
Reductions in operating quality costs result from setting up a total
quality system for two reasons:
-
Lack of existing
effective customer-orientated customer standards may mean current
quality of products is not optimal given use
-
Expenditure on
prevention costs can lead to a severalfold reduction in internal and
external failure costs.
The new 40th Anniversary edition of Dr A V Feigenbaum's book, Total
Quality Control, now further defines TQC for the 1990s in the form of
ten crucial benchmarks for total quality success. These are that:
-
Quality is a
company-wide process.
-
Quality is what the
customer says it is.
-
Quality and cost are a
sum, not a difference.
-
Quality requires both
individual and team zealotry.
-
Quality is a way of
managing.
-
Quality and innovation
are mutually dependent.
-
Quality is an ethic.
-
Quality requires
continuous improvement.
-
Quality is the most
cost-effective, least capital-intensive route to productivity.
-
Quality is implemented
with a total system connected with customers and suppliers.
These are the ten benchmarks for total quality in the 1990s. They make
quality a way of totally focusing the company on the customer - whether
it be the end user or the man or woman at the next work station or next
desk. Most importantly, they provide the company with foundation points
for successful implementation of its international quality leadership.
References
http://geekswithblogs.net/srkprasad/archive/2003/10/27/276.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_V._Feigenbaum
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