What the Differences Between Quailty Control and Quality Management?

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fact, consumers will also consider the quality of design, produce the products are fully functional in the way as they expected. Therefore, the concept of quality assurance has been defined that starting from the planning of new product to after sales service, evaluation is to be tightly conducted and quality assured. Simply to say, no matter in the “product design stage” or “process design stage”, the engineers have a goal to design a product which are meet the specifications and equipment for manufacture and meet customer requirements simultaneously. In this stage, we can see quality assurance emphraize on prevention more than detection, with the use of Statistic Process Control (SPC) and quality system audit.

Statistic Process Control is an effective way to measure and distinguish between the assignable and common variations, predict the occurrence of variations, and help the engineers to hold variations within acceptable limits. After collecting data and plotting in a graph called “control chart”, which consist of a central line representing the mean and a pair of control limit allocating above or below the central limit. The values plotted on the chart which represents the state of the process . When the producers some of the values are located outside the control limits, it can be traced to assignable variables which are the prevailing factor to weave the usual patterns of variation (Appendix 3). Once all the assignable variables are removed, the process is operating in a random manner with no special disruption present, it is said to be stable which means its process capability can be assessed. Therefore, with the use of SPC, producers can ensure that every product meets quality standard through controlling of the manufacturing process.

Regards to Quality Control and Quality Assurance, you will notice that whether the quality problems have happened, it seems that only production managers have to bear the responsibility. How about the other business level in the organisation? It is incredible that the top managers and middle managers have no more or no less responsibility than the front-line managers like them as far as putting a quality program to work is concerned.

In 1961, Armand V. Feigenbaum has developed the concept of Total Quality Management. It requires that the principles of quality management should be applied in every branch and at every level in the organization. Individual departmental systems and requirements to meet this standard would be no longer that the responsibility is only mounted by bottom level of management hierarchy.

Ideally, every successful quality revolution has included the participation of upper management which emphasize the importance of the involvement of the top management. Basically, the critical reason accounting for the failure of quality standards can be attributed to the lukewarm support offered by the top management. What if the top managers just put up the publicity blitz about their commitment to TQM, this kind of lip service will certainly yield to no results. Instead, they should spread the message of “quality first” over the entire organization, then all members of the organization will state a mind that ensuring the high quality of products or services is the first priority of the organizational culture.

Apart from cooperating in the organization, TQM also emphasizes on process-oriented management which refers to the continuous effort by the management as well as employees to ensure the long term customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. However, under the quality control, the manager focuses on result-oriented management and holds a short-term perspective, once a particular result is achieved, they will call off the quality circle until another problem is to be solved, another circle may be formed. While in the process-oriented management, an upstream control is involved which requires the management’s attention to cure the underlying root cause of a problem instead of just solving the problem and letting it arise again in future. Trouble-shooting is never targeted in the TQM. The quality circle members usually use the cause and effect diagram to investigate into the immediate and root causes of an effect (Appendix 4). It helps managers to solve problems by identifying causes systematically. It is no doubt that the variation in the actual product is caused by many causes, which included a number of secondary causes which can be easily identified while the primary causes which influenced by the secondary causes are required the continuous effort by management to figure out them to ensure the long-term high-quality performance. Moreover, a “Plan-Do-Check-Act” (PDCA) cycle is widely accepted as a tool in TQM (Appendix 5). “Plan” means define and identify the causes of the problem. “Do” means the implementation of countermeasures for attacking the problem identified and then measure which strategy is the most effective one. “Check” means the comparison of before and after data to confirm the effectiveness of the processes and measure the results. “Act” means employees document their results and standardize the successful implementation. When the cycle is constantly rotating by the force of customer and quality-orientation, constant improvement in quality can be achieved. Therefore, we will notice that quality actually is an ongoing process of improvement, the management level should not only think about how to detect and prevent the defect of the end products, but also consider the improvement of ineffective processes, that is what the concept of TQM means.

Conclusion

The analysis indicated that the distinguish between quality control and quality management. Since quality is an ongoing process, actually there is a path to develop different quality concepts due to the ever-changing business environment. In the 1800s, customers only emphraize whether there is any defect in the products, so the concept of quality control was developed. Until the 1950s, the manufacturing managers discovered that the design and development process should also be assured so the concept of quality assurance has replaced the previous idea. Start from 1961s, Feigenbaum found that it is impossible that only the producer managers bear the risk of the quality problem, the duty of poor quality should be born in all aspects of business. In order to have the effective continuous improvement of quality, it requires the cooperation of the workers organizational-wide and a general commitment to quality. Consequently, the term “Total Quality Management”, continuous reviewing and assessing of all operational and management practices to ensure that quality is always maintained. Up to now, TQM is still widely used to deal with the quality problems.