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Dr Kaoru IshikawaRise to fameProfessor Ishikawa was born in 1915 and graduated in 1939 from the Engineering Department of Tokyo University having majored in applied chemistry. In 1947 he was made an Assistant Professor at the University. He obtained his Doctorate of Engineering and was promoted to Professor in 1960. He has been awarded the Deming Prize and the Nihon Keizai Press Prize, the Industrial Standardisation Prize for his writings on Quality Control, and the Grant Award in 1971 from the American Society for Quality Control for his education programme on Quality Control. He died in April 1989.Whilst, perhaps ironically, the early origins of the now famous Quality Circles can be traced to the United States in the 1950s, Professor Ishikawa is best known as a pioneer of the Quality Circle movement in Japan in the early 1960s, which has now been re-exported to the West. In a speech to mark the 1000th quality circle convention in Japan in 1981, he described how his work took him in this direction. 'I first considered how best to get grassroots workers to understand and practise Quality Control. The idea was to educate all people working at factories throughout the country but this was asking too much. Therefore I thought of educating factory foremen or on-the-spot leaders in the first place.' In 1968, in his role as Chairman of the Editorial Committee of Genba-To-QC (Quality Control for the Foreman) magazine, Dr Ishikawa built upon quality control articles and exercises written by the editorial committee for the magazine, to produce a 'non-sophisticated' quality analysis textbook for quality circle members. The book Guide to Quality Control was subsequently translated into English in 1971, the most recent (2nd) edition being published by the Asian Productivity Organisation in 1986. Amongst other books, he subsequently published What is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way which was again translated into English (Prentice Hall, 1985). Ishikawa's message-techniquesAs with the other Japanese quality gurus, such as Genichi Taguchi, Kaoru Ishikawa has paid particular attention to making technical statistical techniques used in quality attainment accessible to those in industry. At the simplest technical level, his work has emphasised good data collection and presentation, the use of Pareto Diagrams to prioritise quality improvements and Cause-and-Effect (or Ishikawa or Fishbone) Diagrams.Ishikawa sees the cause-and-effect diagram, like other tools, as a device to assist groups or quality circles in quality improvement. As such, he emphasises open group communication as critical to the construction of the diagrams. Ishikawa diagrams are useful as systematic tools for finding, sorting out and documenting the causes of variation of quality in production and organising mutual relationships between them. Other techniques Ishikawa has emphasised include control charts, scatter diagrams, Binomial probability paper and sampling inspection. Company-wide qualityTurning to organisational, rather than technical contributions to quality, Ishikawa is associated with the Company-wide Quality Control movement that started in Japan in the years 1955-1960 following the visits of Deming and Juran. Under this, quality control in Japan is characterised by company-wide participation from top management to the lower-ranking employees. Further, all study statistical methods. As well as participation by the engineering, design, research and manufacturing departments, also sales, materials and clerical or management departments (such as planning, accounting, business and personnel) are involved. Quality control concepts and methods are used for problem solving in the production process, for incoming material control and new product design control, and also for analysis to help top management decide policy, to verify policy is being carried out and for solving problems in sales, personnel, labour management and in clerical departments. Quality Control Audits, internal as well as external, form part of this activity.To quote Ishikawa: 'The results of these company-wide Quality Control activities are remarkable, not only in ensuring the quality of industrial products but also in their great contribution to the company's overall business. Thus Ishikawa sees the Company-wide Quality Control movement as implying that quality does not only mean the quality of product, but also of after sales service, quality of management, the company itself and the human being. This has the effect that:
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Quality CirclesOne major characteristic of Japanese Company-Wide Quality Control is the Quality Control Circle Movement started in 1962, with the first circle being registered with the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation. Starting in industry in Japan, these have now spread to banks and retailing, and been exported world-wide. Success in the West has not been so extensive as in Japan, however, although even there there have been limitations too.The nature and role of quality circles varies between companies. In Japan a quality circle is a typically voluntary group of some 5-10 workers from the same workshop, who meet regularly and are led by a foreman, assistant foreman, work leader or one of the workers. The aims of the quality circle activities are:
These aims are broader than is consistent with a narrow definition of quality as often used in the West, and Circle activities reflect this.
All members of the circle are continuously engaged in self-and-mutual development, control and improvement whenever possible, the circles implement solutions themselves, otherwise they put strong pressure on management to introduce them. Since management are already committed to the circles, it is ready to listen or act. Circle members receive no direct financial reward for their improvements. The Japanese experience of quality circles itself provides an insight into the problems of implementation in the West. Strangely enough, however, many companies in the West have attempted to minimise or even cover up the Japanese origins, apparently to avoid cultural rejection on antagonism to 'Japanese workaholics' grounds. Even in Japan many quality circles have collapsed, usually because of management's lack of interest or excessive intervention. However, many have worked. There are now more than 10 million circle members there. The benefits are typically seen as being minor from any one improvement introduced by a quality circle, but that added together they represent substantial improvements to the company. Perhaps more importantly, greater worker involvement and motivation is created through:
Can quality circles be transferred successfully to the West?Quality circles have been vigorously marketed in the West as a means of improving quality. There seems to be agreement, however, that they cannot be used naively, and take careful adaption for use in Western companies. Adaptions have been various and of varying effectiveness; in some companies circles have been successful, or regarded as such, in others they have failed. Many commentators, such as Philip Crosby, have warned against the fashion for quality circles as a cure-all for poor employee motivation or inadequate quality and productivity in either white-collar areas or on the shopfloor. The senior American Quality Guru Joseph Juran, in particular, has gone further, in throwing doubts on their likely effectiveness in the West at all where few company hierarchies are permitted with executives trained in quality management.
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The members of the circle have mastered statistical quality control and related
methods and all utilise them to achieve significant results in quality improvement,
cost reduction, productivity and safety. The seven tools of quality control are
taught to all employees: