Evolution & Foundations of Quality Management: Theory to Lean Production, Slides of Business Management and Analysis

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Speaker Name Presentation Title

THEORY OF QUALITY MANAGEMENT: ITS

ORIGINS AND HISTORY

Lauri Koskela, Algan Tezel, Viranj Patel University of Huddersfield

Decline of the quality discipline?

⚫ On TQM: “…during the first 10 years of the new millennium, the term TQM seems to have lost its attractiveness in Western parts of the world” (Dahlgaard-Park 2011) ⚫ On ISO 9000: “We have followed like sheep, pursued goals without challenging whether they were the right goals but most of all we have forgotten why we were doing this. It was to improve quality, but clearly it has not.” (Hoyle 2007)

What might be the cause?

⚫ Scott and Cole ( 2000 ) claim that the quality effort is not readily linked to a well- identified, clearly specified set of ideas and practices but, rather, appears as a loosely coupled collection of orientations and practices. ⚫ We politely disagree: The seminal authors on quality have presented influential theoretical and philosophical starting points for quality. Unfortunately, those starting points fall outside the usual paradigms of management scholars, and they have often failed to spot them.

Where can the theoretical and philosophical ideas of

quality management be found?

⚫ Quality is about artifacts produced: production (theory) ⚫ Knowledge is needed: epistemology ⚫ For perceiving and acting for the sake of quality, a conception on what is out there in the world is needed: ontology ⚫ What we are searching for should be actionable!

Epistemology

⚫ The scientific method (Shewhart and Deming 1939) is to be used: “In this sense, specification, production, and inspection correspond respectively to making a hypothesis, carrying out an experiment, and testing the hypothesis. These three steps constitute a dynamic scientific process of acquiring knowledge” ⚫ This is Aristotelian epistemology, rather than Platonic ⚫ More: Koskela, L., Ferrantelli, A., Niiranen, J., Pikas, E., & Dave, B. (2018). Epistemological explanation of lean construction. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management , 145 (2), 04018131.

Simply…

Mainstream thinking on management and production is Platonic Lean thinking is Aristotelian Ideas World Ideas World

Plan-do! Plan-do-check-act!

How did these starting points influence?

The case of Total Quality Management

⚫ Dean and Bowen (1994) contended that in Total Quality Management, there are three basic principles: (1) customer focus, (2) continuous improvement, and (3) teamwork. ⚫ These neatly correspond to the underlying theory of quality as discussed above: ⚫ Customer focus is compatible with the value generation model of production. ⚫ Continuous improvement is compatible both with Aristotelian epistemology and process metaphysics. ⚫ Teamwork is compatible with process metaphysics.

Problematic tendencies

⚫ Two problematic tendencies become visible:

1. independently from the quality movement, quality practices and techniques were developed based on another theory of production, (improvement outside the starting points) and
2. the original starting points are forgotten or misunderstood (deterioration).

What did this mean?

⚫ Quality was needed, not primarily for the sake of the customer, but for realizing the Just-in-Time system ⚫ Quality was needed for reducing temporal variability, rather than dimensional and functional variation only ⚫ Q uality was approached from inside production, and generic tools, such as source inspection and fool- proofing mechanisms, poka yoke , were promoted for ensuring zero defects in produced parts (Shingo 1988). ⚫ This contrasts to the mainstream quality thinking that looks at quality as an outcome of production, and assumes the rectification of a quality problem to be one of a kind, separate from general improvement of production. ⚫ “ISO 9000/QS 9000 was unnecessary for Toyota, moreover, because it was incomplete: It did not deal with cost, one of the two pillars of management.” (Hino 2005)

What happened to the epistemological starting point?

⚫ ISO 9000 series of quality standards, first published in 1987 and revised in 1994, 2000 and 2015 ⚫ These standards contained a prescriptive approach to quality: they stipulated which kind of documents should be prepared for the quality system. ⚫ This represents Platonic epistemology (Koskela et al. 2018): existing knowledge is pushed to the world. ⚫ Outcome: not even one case where identified quality problems would have led to improvement action in the studied organizations that followed the mentioned standard could be found in a recent Irish research (Taggart 2016). ⚫ It is only the newest version of the standard (2015) that takes a much less procedural approach and stresses the application of the PDCA cycle at all levels of an organization.

Conclusion

⚫ The degeneration of the original philosophical foundation seems to be one of the longstanding problems in the area of quality ⚫ Value generation theory of production is a partial theory of production; quality should also be approached through the flow theory. Lacking theoretical evolution seems another long-standing problem that arguably has hindered the progress of quality management.