Quality management

Quality management is a recent phenomenon. Advanced civilizations that supported the arts and crafts allowed clients to choose goods meeting higher quality standards than normal goods. In societies where art and craft (and craftsmanship) were valued, one of the responsibilities of a master craftsman (and similarly for artists) was to lead their studio, train and supervise the work of their craftsmen and apprentices. The master craftsman set standards, reviewed the work of others and ordered rework and revision as necessary. One of the limitations of the craft approach was that relatively few goods could be produced, on the other hand an advantage was that each item produced could be individually shaped to suit the client. This craft based approach to quality and the practices used were major inputs when quality management was created as a management science.

Benchmarking is the use of standard measurements in a service or industry for comparison to other organizations in order to gain perspective on organizational performance.

Continuous Improvement, in regard to organizational quality and performance, focuses on improving customer satisfaction through continuous and incremental improvements to processes, including by removing unnecessary activities and variations.

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis

is an approach that helps identify and prioritize potential equipment and process failures.

ISO9000

is an internationally recognized standard of quality, and includes guidelines to accomplish the ISO9000 quality standard. Organizations can be optionally audited to earn ISO9000 certification.

Total Quality Improvement

(TQM) is a set of management practices throughout the organization, geared to ensure the organization consistently meets or exceeds customer requirements. TQM places strong focus on process measurement and controls as means of continuous improvement.

Six Sigma

is a quality management initiative that takes a very data-driven, methodological approach to eliminating defects with the aim to reach six standard deviations from the desired target of quality. Six standard deviations means 3.4 defects per million.

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