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 From Quality Control and Quality Assurance to Quality Management

Until the 1940's the method of ensuring delivery of quality products to customers was based on what was known as quality control . At the end of a factory production line there was usually a team of people carrying out inspection activities to weed out products that would not meet customer requirements.

At the end of the 1940's the Department of Defense in the USA recognised the benefits of a system that had transformed the Japanese manufacturing industry. The standardized system developed by the Department of Defense was called quality assurance and involved organizations establishing procedures to manage all the functions that affected the quality of the manufactured products.

Based on British standards formulated and experimented with in the years before, in 1987 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued the their ISO 9000 family of standards for quality management, which were revised to make them more user friendly for service industries in 1994 and again in 2000.

The new idea of Quality Management is: Not production first and then control, but organising the company and the production process in a way to make sure than only quality can be produced.

The credo of Quality Management is: Quality or the lack of it is not a question of good or bad luck or good or bad workers but of good organisation including customer orientation of all parts of the company, training of staff: Quality starts in the Mind.

 Contact: wolfgang.arlt@fh-stralsund.de  Office: 1/132, Tel. (03831) 45 6961