Quality Control

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. However, quality standards are sometimes not kept up to a high level and reasons for that are endless. This report explains quality control and traces back to its early days of development. Furthermore, this report will depict three theorists, Deming, Juran and Crosby, whom all share a united view on quality control. The report will then clarify where quality control is used and if its been successful or unsuccessful in the past.

Quality control may generally be defined as a system that maintains a desired level of quality, through feedback on product/service characteristics and implementation of remedial actions, in case of a deviation of such characteristics from a specified standard. This general area may be divided into three main subareas: off-line quality control, statistical process control, and acceptance sampling plans (Mitra, A. 2008).

The origin of quality control can be traced as far back as the history of the industry itself. The condition in which mummies have been found and the quality of metals and inks produced in the remote past are examples of the high quality of some ancient products. However, not until the twelfth century were quality standards established by associations (Dhillon, B. 1984).

The industrial revolution played an important role in the development of the quality control discipline because of the introduction of the concept of specialization of labor. During World War 1 and World War 2, the development of quality control charts was regarded as an important breakthrough due to inspection problems that occurred in laboratories. The origin of quality control goes back to World War 2 with the original concept that a chain cannot be made stronger than its weakest link was introduced during the development of missiles in Germany. During the period...