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Angelica O. Datuin

MM 3-3

Quality Guru’s

Walter Andrew Shewhart was a giant among giants in the quality movement during the first half of the 20th century. He preached the importance of adapting management processes to create profitable situations for both businesses and consumers, promoting the utilization of his own creation -- the SPC control chart.

Dr. Shewhart believed that lack of information greatly hampered the efforts of control and management processes in a production environment. In order to aid a manager in making scientific, efficient, economical decisions. He also developed the Shewhart Cycle Learning and Improvement cycle, combining both creative management thinking with statistical analysis. This cycle contains four continuous steps: Plan, Do, Study and Act. These steps, he believed, ultimately lead to total quality improvement. The cycle draws its structure from the notion that constant evaluation of management practices -- as well as the willingness of management to adopt and disregard unsupported ideas --are keys to the evolution of a successful enterprise.

William Edwards Deming was born in Iowa in 1900. His modest upbringing in an early settler community was to instil habits of thriftiness and a dislike of waste which was to influence his later thinking.

Deming was preoccupied with why things do not behave as predicted. All systems have variation, but he argued that it is essential for managers to be able to distinguish between special and common causes of variation. He developed a theory of variation - that special causes of variation are usually easily attributable to quickly recognizable factors such as changes of procedure, change of shift or operator but that common causes will remain when special causes have been eliminated. Continuous improvement is another innovation of Deming which suggests that quality is not a goal which is achieved and then maintained, but rather that it is a continuous process which demands real...