History Of Quality Control

The roles of quality control can trace its roots all the way to medieval Europe. During the end of the 13th century up until the early 19th century, craftsmen throughout medieval Europe formed themselves into unions based on their craft. These unions were called guilds. They became responsible for developing strict rules and specifications for the quality of the products and services they produced. Quality inspectors enforced the rules by marking properly crafted goods with a special mark or symbol. The process grew from that point gradually with time and as industry itself evolved so did the role of quality control. The next notable change didn’t come until the onset of the factory system in Great Britain during the 1750’s. A product of their industrial revolution it began to divide the craftsmen to specialize on one particular

Armand V. Feigenbaum. He is known as the father of what is referred to as Total Quality Management. According to his foundation he developed the “Total Quality Control” concept while concurrently at GE. He introduced the concept first in an article in 1946. In 1951, while a doctoral student at MIT, Dr. Feigenbaum wrote the first edition of his book Total Quality Control. He established the principles of Total Quality Management (“TQM”), the approach to quality and profitability that has profoundly influenced management strategy and productivity in the competition for world markets in the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. He wrote, “Total quality control is an effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production and service at the most economical levels which allow full customer satisfaction.” (Feigenbaum Foundation, 2013) His principles of TQM were as