Topic of This Month - July/1998
"Total Quality" is the topic of July 1998. This page will be updated every month. If there is any request or suggestion, please send it to me.
Total Quality
1. What is "Quality" in Merchandizing?
Not only people working in Quality Control (QC) Field are studying regarding "Quality". Mr. Tomiyoshi Yoshida authored a book titled "Gendai Shouhin Ron (Modern Merchandising Theory)" published by Doyukan in 1988. He is also the author of the book titled "Ohanashi Shouhin Gaku (Stories of Merchandizing)" published by Japanese Standards Association. Very interesting articles of his appeared in the monthly magazine "Hyojunka to Hinshitu Kanri (Standardization and Quality Control)" serially from January 1987 to December 1987. This series was also titled "Ohanashi Shouhin Gaku (Stories of Merchandizing)". He put many interesting interpretations concerning merchandize and quality in it. The followings are the sub-titles of the series:
1) Japanese "Merchandized Society"
2) Eyes to 'Look through' Merchandizes
3) Merchandizes and Categorization
4) Variety of Merchandizes
5) Renovation of the Merchandize Concept
6) Value and Quality of Use
7) Quality an Price of Merchandize
8) Name and Brand
9) Name and Brand (Continued)
10) Images of Merchandizes - Colors and Wrappings
11) Interests in Theoretical Merchandizing and Its Future
From these sub-titles, you may guess the contents must be interesting especially for the people who study or work regarding QC.
I was attracted by the quality concept of merchandizing field when I learned his concept in Mr. Tomiyoshi Yoshida’s "Gendai Shouhin Ron (Modern Merchandising Theory)" book. There he explained quality concerning "value of use" and "environment of the earth". After reading this book, I studied with other merchandizing books written by several scholars and found many interesting reports in them.
In his book, Mr. Tomiyoshi Yoshida mentioned many sorts of quality. He mentioned quality of raw material that is extracted from the earth. Quality of raw material is followed by quality of parts and/or components as parts and/or components are processed using raw materials. Parts and components are assembled or processed and Products are manufactured. Here quality of product appears. After production, products are sold to customers. At this stage, quality of merchandize is concerned. Customers use products after buying them - quality of product in use. Used products are recycled and reused - quality of recycled product. Adding to all the above, here comes quality of waste. At this final stage, used or recycled products are abandoned.
It must be important to analyze the difference of merchandize and product, but there is a point that is more important. The chain from raw material to waste should be deeply considered. By developing this chain idea further, I think, we will find some common ideas between this chain and the thought of "reverse factory" that was mentioned in the book "Made in Japan".
2. The Thought of Reverse Factory
In QC field, two kinds of quality have been considered: "quality of conformity" and "quality of design". According to Mr. Tomiyoshi Yoshida, quality consists of quality of raw material, quality of parts and/or components, quality of product, quality of merchandize, quality of product in use, quality of recycled product and quality of waste. If we compare the concept in QC field and the concept of Mr. Yoshida, it is clear that the quality concept common in QC field was mainly focused on raw material Quality and product Quality. QC People also tended to be more emphasized on product quality. Precisely, quality in QC field meant quality of conformance and quality of design for product quality in the past.
However, recently many new topics appeared such as ISO9000, PL (Product Liability) regulations, ISO14000, etc. Companies are required by public to cover not only product quality but also quality of waste. The thought of "reverse factory" is a proposition of new systems that recycle materials by extracting them from wastes. With reverse factory we can stop extracting resources form our Mother Nature.
In Japan, there already is a plant that produces crude oil form plastic wastes. NHK, the Japanese national TV broadcasting station, has brought the report of the plant and its system. At this plant styrol-foam and PET wastes are grounded, steamed at the temperature between 350 and 360 OC, and reduced to crude oil.
The founder of Ford Motor dreamed a production line that steel is inputted and automobiles are outputted. This is the production line only from raw material to product. Mr. Ford perhaps did not consider about cars in use, recycled cars, wasted cars or reduction of automobile to raw material, or this entire material cycle. Today we have to take actions for wastes whenever we produce products.
In Japan, many communities have started to collect steel cans and aluminum cans separately from other wastes. Collected cans are reduced to lumps of steel or aluminum. When a can of soft drink is reduced, prints on the can surface are erased. Do inks of the prints harm the process of reduction? Soft drink manufacturers should consider it when they produce products. We see many recycled papers. When we produce products made from papers, we have to plan appropriate reverse factories at the same time.
Quality of product in use is important for PL (Product Liability). We can not concentrate only on quality of product or quality of merchandize anymore. Products have to be easy to reuse; in other words, quality of used product should be considered. Furthermore, in the very near future, the public will start to severely require quality of waste. Manufacturers will be required to provide products with the certain character: easy to abandon/waste. Manufacturers will also need to assure high quality of recycled raw materials reduced from their products.
3. Goods and Bads
In English, the word "goods" is supposed to be used only for the good things. However, many bad things are called "goods" in our real world.
Recently, many people are mentioning about "bads". Goods were good things in the past; so, it did not cause any problem even if they remained unsold. However, the situation changed. Today it costs to abandon unsold goods. These unsold products are not goods any more. They are bads. Companies always put their efforts to produce goods, but in many cases, they find out that they invested on nothing but bads at the end.
Companies exist to provide goods and services to its customers. But in many cases, it seems, companies are not producing goods. If a company produces bads, the bads cause loss to the company. Even worse, Bads bring loss to society, too. Not only the responsible companies pay for the loss caused by bads. Other people are also forced to pay for it.
For instance, fluorocarboned hydrogen gas had been used a lot on many purposes for long period. It destroyed the ozone layer surrounding the earth, as you know. Today supercritical liquid is under development to be its substantial. The earth environment was destroyed because of our ignorance. We used too much fluorocarboned hydrogen gas in a short time. Fluorocarboned hydrogen gas used to be contained in many spray products. Those sprays were very convenient for the most customers and consumers. I used to be one of the customers and consumed those spray products. Concerning "fitness for use" the sprays were the good quality products. However, now we know that the spray products with fluorocarboned hydrogen gas were not goods. They were bads. They were bad to the earth environment.
Cellular telephones are very convenient for us. They are spread out all over the world very rapidly. The effect of electric wave comes out from its antenna is not clearly explained, yet. Many people are concerning the possibility of its bad influences to human body. The specification of cellular telephone antenna was determined based on the specification of car antenna. Cellular telephones usually stay very close to human body physically. There is a great possibility that cellular telephone turns from goods to bads suddenly.
Some company invented a strong shock-resistance ceramic. Dishes and cups made from this kind of ceramic won’t break even when they slip off from your hands and hit the ground. It is very convenient for the customers. However, the companies dealing with the ceramic wastes are having serious difficulty to waste them. This ceramic is high quality concerning quality of product in use, but this is not good quality product if you concern quality of waste.
Dioxin pollution is another example. Plastic products are goods to use, but bads to waste. Plastic products cause dioxin pollution if they are not burned at certain temperature.
What is a real quality product? At the stage of product development, quality of product in use and quality of waste also must be considered. Then, the public will approve the real high quality of products. ISO9000 series require guaranteeing quality of all kinds of entity that a plant or a company produces. We have to expand our quality concept broader. Quality should be considered in much wider sense.
4. Quality in QFD
What is the quality concept in QFD (Quality Function Deployment)? Before QFD is disseminated widely, only quality of conformity and quality of design were concerned in QC world. During the early era of Japanese QC movement, people focused on quality of manufacturing/conformity. Why was that? Because manufacturing quality has variance and quality of design is stable. In other words, at first, people emphasized on the management activities to produce products no-variance and conformable with design quality.
Manufacturing quality in Japan was improved drastically. Companies succeeded to develop systems to realize less-variance manufacturing. Installation of statistical methods and many other activities contributed for this development. However, even when products were produced with 100% quality of conformity, customers would not buy products with poor quality of design. Because of it, planned quality became more important. Planned quality should be settled before the determination of quality of design. Then, planned quality has to be founded on what? The answer that Japanese found was "required quality".
Required quality is the quality that customers require in the market. How important is the required quality for customers (Importance degree)? How much do customers expect the required quality (Expectation degree)? Based on these 2 degrees: importance degree and expectation degree, planned quality is determined. And then, finally quality of design is established and products are produced. Of course, quality of conformity to the established quality of design should be assured. Quality of conformity should be conformable with not only quality of design but also customer requirements in the market.
This is an example of a ballpoint pen company. The company produces ballpoint pens known as product X. The company has concrete specifications such as length of penholder or diameter of penholder. For product X, penholder length is specified 140mm, and diameter 8mm. These numbers are quality of design. They are invariable. Penholders are manufactured targeting at the specifications with certain processing equipment. Manufactured penholders will vary with small differences from one to another. Even if the processing equipment were with high accuracy, the variation would not be eliminated.
Quality of conformity is to know how much a product is conformable with its quality of design. Japanese companies settled a goal long time ago. The aim was to produce products conformable with their quality of design. Some variances still exist, though many Japanese companies have already accomplished this goal. However, their products are conformable to the specifications. Now the companies produce their products with very slight variances comparing the specifications.
Then, how specifications should be determined? Why did the company determine 140mm for the length and 8mm for the diameter of product X?
The length or the diameter of penholder must be determined based on customer requirements. Customers will buy a ballpoint pen if it is "easy to hold" or does "not make him/her tired after writing for a long time". Maybe customers will buy the pen without realizing their requirements. However, companies must have a good grasp of all the potential customer requirements. Products should be designed to satisfy customer requirements. Customers may have other requirements, too: "colorful", "lovely form", "interesting form", etc. It is difficult to satisfy all the requirements. However, companies are responsible to design their products that satisfy customer requirements as much as possible. On the other hand, a product may be designed to satisfy a very specific requirement on the purpose of differentiation from the competitors.
QFD realizes to assure a good production process at the designing stage. Customer requirements are translated into required quality. Planned quality is determined based on required quality. Planned quality is completely converted into quality of design. Then, products are manufactured with high quality of conformance. This is the very famous and general flow of QFD. But does it cover quality of waste? I reflect that we have been mainly emphasizing quality from raw material to product by now.
5. Total Quality
The future QC will expect us to have many more viewpoints that are different from the ones we presently have. Quality Assurance (QA) will require us the same. We have to think "what kind of quality" we assure. We assure quality of conformity. We also assure quality of design. Planned quality and required quality should be assured, too. There is another question: who assures quality to whom? We need to study the word "quality" more precisely, then we will be able to assure more concrete quality.
The term "Total Quality Control (TQC)" was first proposed by Dr. Armand Vallin Feigenbaum. I found many differences between the term TQC by Dr. Feigenvaum and the same term we use in Japan. Anyway, Dr. Feigenbaum was the first person who added the word "total" on the term "quality control".
Total Quality Control is also known as "Company-Wide Quality Control (CWQC)". In Japan, TQC means QC activities implemented at all departments and all companies in a corporate group. During the early days QC activities were only implemented at manufacturing and its directly related departments. Soon the movement was spread corporate-widely to other departments including sales, human resources and others. Top management expected the good results at other departments.
Now, and in the future, QA should be intended not only nationally but also internationally. What I mean is that companies must consider standards of exporting countries as well as Japanese standards. ISO may be one of the solutions. When ISO is completed, we will have the worldwide standards. As far as I learned about the global market integration such as the European Union, it seems that the worldwide standards will be common very soon.
Matters related to PL are a proof that Japanese companies are required to assure quality of products in use. ISO14000 is requiring assurance of quality of waste. Quality has to be subdivided into quality of parts/components, quality of product, quality of merchandize, quality of product in use, quality of recycled product and quality of waste. All of these have to be kept, confirmed and proved. This is Quality Assurance.
Concerning the above sub-divided qualities, of course, quality of design and required quality must be assured as same as quality of manufacturing. These assurances should be done at the designing stage. Otherwise, your company will be left alone behind the tide of the rapid progresses in the world. I believe this is the fastest and the most reliable way to go to attain your target. It does not matter if your target is cost reduction, productivity improvement or quality improvement.
When you tackle with problems related to quality, please try to deal with precise and concrete qualities, such as quality of conformity or quality of design or quality of product or quality of product in use. This approach will help you improve your Total Quality.