Genichi taguchi contribution to quality management

Genichi Taguchi: Total Quality Management Guru Introduction: Every person has had his experience with quality and every person can give his own reflection on what he perceived to be of poor or high quality. Not until the early 1950’s did total quality management emerged at the top of firms’ schemata hence making quality improvement as the highest priority in any institution, firm or business. Based on the fact that quality comes from integrated efforts of teams, employees and each level in an organization, total quality management was introduced and applied in all businesses as a means to enhance total quality by working on each level and stage in the service delivery or production. TQM in History: It is vitally crucial before one dwells into the work offered by Taguchi to observe the timeline in which prominent gurus of quality management placed to build a scaffold on which TQM, Total Quality Management, was evolved. Figure 1: Timeline showing the differences between old and new concepts of quality Looking at Figure 1 above, it is illustrative that a major shift happened in the 1970’s in the concepts of quality. The old concept of quality meant solely inspection after production, where the new concept of quality involves a corrective and preventive approach by building quality in the process of production and service delivery by identifying and correcting the causes of quality problems. Before the swing in quality concepts could happen, many experts tried to define quality, quantify it and relate it to the overall performance of a firm. The timeline below summarizes the work done by who we know as quality management gurus: Figure 2: Quality Gurus and their Contribution to TQM Genichi Taguchi: Total Quality Management Guru Page 2 Genichi Taguchi and his Contribution to TQM Some argue about the limitations of the theories proposed by Maslow and Herzberg. Maslow’s theory was Genichi Taguchi: Total Quality Management Guru Page 3 Works Cited Genichi Taguchi: Total Quality Management Guru Page 4 ...