Quality in everyday life and business, engineering and manufacturing has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority, superiority or usefulness of something. In ordinary usage pragmatism refers to behavior which temporarily sets aside one ideal to pursue a lesser more achievable ideal In Economics, utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of Consumption of various Goods and services. This is the most common interpretation of the term.

Many different techniques and concepts have evolved to improve product or service quality, including SPC, Zero Defects, Six Sigma, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, quality circles, TQM, Theory of Constraints (TOC),Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000 and others) and continuous improvement. Statistical Process Control (SPC is an effective method of monitoring a process through the use of Control charts Control charts enable the use of objective criteria for distinguishing " Zero Defects " is Step 7 of " Philip Crosby 's 14 Step Quality Improvement Process". Six Sigma is a Business management strategy originally developed by Motorola, that today enjoys wide-spread application in many sectors of industry A Quality Circle is a Volunteer group composed of Workers (or even Students who meet to discuss workplace improvement and make presentations to Management Total Quality Management ( TQM) is a business Management strategy aimed at embedding Awareness of Quality in all organizational processes Theory of Constraints (TOC is an overall Management philosophy. Quality Management System (QMS can be defined as a set of Policies, processes and procedures required for Planning and execution ( ISO 9000 is a family of standards for Quality management systems ISO 9000 is maintained by ISO the International Organization for Standardization and is Kaizen ( 改善, Japanese for "continuous improvement" is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects

The meaning for the term quality has developed over time. Various interpretations are given below:

1. ISO 9000 - "Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfills requirements"
2. Six Sigma - "Uniformity around a target value"
3. (Philip B. Crosby in the 1980s)- "Conformance to requirements". ISO 9000 is a family of standards for Quality management systems ISO 9000 is maintained by ISO the International Organization for Standardization and is Six Sigma is a Business management strategy originally developed by Motorola, that today enjoys wide-spread application in many sectors of industry WikipediaPersondata --> Philip Bayard "Phil" Crosby, ( June 18, 1926 &ndash August 18, 2001) was a The 1980s was the decade spanning from January 1 1980 to December 31 1989. The difficulty with this is that the requirements may not fully represent customer expectations; Crosby treats this as a separate problem. A customer is someone who makes use of the paid products of an individual or Organization.
4. (Joseph M. Juran). Joseph Moses Juran ( December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) was a 20th century management consultant who is principally remembered as an - "Fitness for use". Fitness is defined by the customer.
5. (Noriaki Kano and others)- A two-dimensional model of quality. Professor Noriaki Kano is the developer of a program whose simple ranking scheme distinguishes between essential and differentiating attributes related to concepts of customer quality The quality has two dimensions: "must-be quality" and "attractive quality". The former is near to the "fitness for use" and the latter is what the customer would love, but has not yet thought about. Supporters characterize this model more succinctly as: "Products and services that meet or exceed customers' expectations". In Marketing, a product is anything that can be offered to a Market that might satisfy a want or need A service is the non-material equivalent of a good. A service provision is an economic activity that does not result in Ownership, and this is what differentiates
6. (Gerald M. Weinberg)- "Value to some person". Gerald Marvin Weinberg ('Jerry' is an author and teacher of the Psychology and Anthropology of computer Software development. Value theory encompasses a range of approaches to understanding how why and to what degree humans should or do value things whether the thing is a person idea object or anything else
7. (Robert Pirsig)- The result of care. Robert Maynard Pirsig (born September 6, 1928, Minneapolis Minnesota) is an American Writer and Philosopher, mainly known
8. (W. Edwards Deming)- "Quality and the Required Style of Management" 1988 See http://www.deming.org/. William Edwards Deming ( October 14, 1900 – December 20, 1993) was an American Statistician, Professor, "Costs go down and productivity goes up, as improvement of quality is accomplished by better management of design, engineering, testing and by improvement of processes. Better quality at lower price has a chance to capture a market. Cutting costs without improvement of quality is futile. "
9. (Genichi Taguchi). Gen'ichi Taguchi (田口 玄- Taguchi Genichi (born January 1, 1924 in Tokamachi, Japan) is an Engineer and Statistician Taguchi's definition of quality is based on a more comprehensive view of the production system, and he relates Quality (or, more precisely, the lack of it) to "The loss a product imposes on society after it is shipped".
10. One key distinction to make is there are two common applications of the term Quality as form of activity or function within a business. One is Quality Assurance which is the "prevention of defects", such as the deployment of a Quality Management System and preventative activities like FMEA. The other is Quality Control which is the "detection of defects", most commonly associated with testing which takes place within a Quality Management System typically referred to as Verification and Validation.

American Society for Quality Source: http://www.asq.org/glossary/q.html. American Society for Quality (ASQ, formerly known as American Society for Quality Control (ASQC, is a knowledge-based global community of Quality control experts "a subjective term for which each person has his or her own definition. In technical usage, quality can have two meanings:

1. the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.
2. a product or service free of deficiencies. "

The quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service meets the customer's expectations. Quality has no specific meaning unless related to a specific function and/or object. Quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute.

The dimensions of quality refer to the attributes that quality achieves in Operations Management

• Quality supports dependability
• Dependability supports Speed
• Speed supports Flexibility
• Flexibility supports Cost. Operations management is an area of business that is concerned with the production of goods and services and involves the responsibility of ensuring that Business operations

Quality ↔ Dependability ↔ Speed ↔ Flexibility ↔ Cost

In the manufacturing industry it is commonly stated that “Quality drives productivity. ” Improved productivity is a source of greater revenues, employment opportunities and technological advances. In business revenue or revenues is Income that a company receives from its normal business activities usually from the sale of goods and services Most discussions of quality refer to a finished part, wherever it is in the process. Inspection, which is what quality insurance usually means, is historical, since the work is done. The best way to think about quality is in process control. If the process is under control, inspection is not necessary.

However, there is one characteristic of modern quality that is universal. In the past, when we tried to improve quality, typically defined as producing fewer defective parts, we did so at the expense of increased cost, increased task time, longer cycle time, etc. We could not get fewer defective parts and lower cost and shorter cycle times, and so on. However, when modern quality techniques are applied correctly to business, engineering, manufacturing or assembly processes, all aspects of quality - customer satisfaction and fewer defects/errors and cycle time and task time/productivity and total cost, etc. Customer satisfaction, a Business term, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation - must all improve or, if one of these aspects does not improve, it must at least stay stable and not decline. So modern quality has the characteristic that it creates AND-based benefits, not OR-based benefits. In Logic and/or Mathematics, logical conjunction or and is a two-place Logical operation that results in a value of true if both of

The most progressive view of quality is that it is defined entirely by the customer or end user and is based upon that person's evaluation of his or her entire customer experience. The customer experience is the aggregate of all the touch points that customers have with the company's product and services, and is by definition a combination of these. For example, any time one buys a product one forms an impression based on how it was sold, how it was delivered, how it performed, how well it was supported etc.

See also

• ISO 9000
• Metaphysics of Quality
• Qualitative
• Quality control
• Quality investing
• Quality Management
• Quality of Life
• Six Sigma
• Software quality
• Theory of Constraints
• Total Quality Management
• Video quality
• W. Edwards Deming

Finding related topics

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