Define Controlling and explain the Total Quality Control (TQC) including Deming’s 14 points.

What is Quality Control? 

Quality control is a method of monitoring the quality of products and services offered by a company. The quality of a product is an attribute of the product, and may be a measure of the degree of excellence. Quality is relative to the entity that measures it. Needless to say, quality may be a degree or grade of excellence or worth offered to the market or to a consumer; it is a characteristic property that defines the apparent individual nature of something. 

Total Quality Control: 

Total quality control is a process that strives to build high quality products before rejecting defective products. Total quality control involves the following:

• Senior management. 
• Training in quality control. 
• High-grade goods and services. 
• High-grade raw materials. 
• Quality control in production. 
• Quality control in distribution, installation, and usage. 

The Philosophy of TQC 

The philosophy of TQC is to make "continuous process improvements to increase customer satisfaction.“ Note that the focus is on our customer, not ourselves. That customer can be an internal customer at the next process step, or an external customer that purchases or uses our product or service. 

The Purpose of TQC 

The purpose of TQC is to help us reduce two of the biggest drivers of cost in our processes ­variation and complexity. The more complex our processes are the more chance we have of performing them incorrectly. Variation in our processes causes deviation from the target. The further away we are from the target, the more loss we have. 

The Principles of TQC 

One way to understand TQC is through its five principles. They are: 

1. Establish a commitment to continuous improvement 
2. Eliminate root cause of problems 
3. Assign clear responsibility for action 
4. Build customer/supplier relationships 
5. Provide feedback 

Let's look at each in more detail. 

Establish a Commitment to Continuous Improvement: The commitment to continuous improvement takes the form of minimizing complexity, reducing variation, and eliminating waste. It is not enough to just say it - we must do it. Or, as Dr. Deming said, "It is not enough to work hard, we must know what to." Except for the simplest of problems, we must understand and use proven problem solving processes and tools. Finally, we must understand there is no point of diminishing returns. The need to improve always exists. We must understand what the problem is, what its causes are, what the solutions can be, when and how to make the necessary changes, and whether or not the changes were effective. 

Eliminate root cause of problems: We quickly find that without the facts, without quantifiable data, we cannot get to the root cause of the problem. For most problems, the root cause lies deep under the surface. Emotion and casual analysis are not sufficient for most problems. We must use data to point the way. 

The root cause appears as a single bar at the bottom of a multi-level Pareto Chart. When we see it, there is no choice or debate about what we need to correct. 

Assign clear responsibility for action: Very few problems of any consequence involve just one person. The difficult problems involve multiple organizations and multiple skill sets. Nevertheless, someone has to be responsible. Someone has to know that he or she is going to be the one to head up the effort to find a solution on a given opportunity. Someone must follow through. Otherwise, although everyone knows of the problem, we may find no one did anything about it. It simply fell into the cracks between organizations. 

Build Customer / Supplier Relationships: TQC views our processes as a series of customer and supplier links. No one, and no process, is an island. All are related. Some customers are internal to our company; some are external. Requirements emanate from the customer. The supplier's job is to satisfy or conform to them, or better yet, exceed them. This cannot be done without close customer / supplier communications. These communications need to occur peer to peer, not up and down some laborious chain of command. 

Provide Feedback: Each person is responsible to improve his or her own quality. We must realize, however, that we do not work in a vacuum. Each person must feed data back to his customers and suppliers. 

When we see a problem, we are often quick to say, ''That's not my problem." However, with TQC, if we see a problem or opportunity, it is our responsibility to do something about it, whether the root cause lies in our area or not. We may be the only one who sees it, and if we do not feed the data back, it may never be resolved. Again, we may not be the only one involved in the solution, but we will likely be part of the team, because our data is necessary in establishing a clear understanding of the cause. 

The Process of TQC 

The Plan / Do / Check / Action are at the heart of a proven problem solving process. Figure 3.1 shows the PDCA circle and flowchart. The circle is sometimes called the Deming Circle, but Dr. Deming said he didn't develop it, Shewhart did. Whatever! Adopt the Nike slogan and "Just do it!" 

Plan: The TQC process begins with the plan section. Here, we must concisely describe the problem or opportunity. We also need to identify someone to head a team that is clearly responsible for following this opportunity through to a satisfactory conclusion. We must explain the nature of this problem (without jumping to conclusions or solutions). We might also want to explain how the opportunity relates to a key objective, or project, if appropriate. We then have to determine the priority of the problem; we have many opportunities, so we need to know if this problem commands attention over others currently competing for our time. We then need to quantify the magnitude of the problem in terms of key performance measures and state the intermediate and long-term goals. When the intermediate goal is reached, we will assess the need for any further concentrated effort on this problem. This too will be gauged in light of the priority of other opportunities. 

Do: In the Do section, we need to describe the causes of the problem (not the problem itself again, and without jumping to an explanation of solutions). We must ask why the problem occurred in order to expose the first level causes of the problem. Once we have identified those first-level elements, we must again ask why each of them happened and how they contributed to the development of the problem's second-level elements. For most difficult problems, we must ask why at least four or five times, or levels. Once we have uncovered the root cause of a problem, we can creatively develop a countermeasure. Then we must implement that proposed solution to the problem.

Check: Once we have implemented our proposal, we must check to see if we were effective. If we have correctly identified the cause to the problem and satisfactorily implemented the correct solution, we should see the performance measures converge on the goal. If the performance does not change, either we have not identified the cause and effect of the problem, or we have proposed ineffective countermeasures. If we converge on the goal but do not reach it, we must go back to the Do section. Here, we will trace down another level, expose more aspects of the problem and correct them also. Once we have reached the goal we can proceed. 

Act: In the Act or Action area, we standardize the change by asking in what other areas a similar constraint might arise. It is often difficult and time-consuming to trace to the root cause of a complex problem chain. Therefore, we should leverage our efforts by implementing the countermeasures in other areas that are likely to experience the same problem. 

The fourteen (14) points of Quality Control by Deming: 

Deming stated that high-quality products result in lower costs. 

1. “Create constancy of purpose towards improvement”. Replace short-term reaction with long-term planning. 
2. “Adopt the new philosophy”. The implication is that management should actually adopt his philosophy, rather than merely expect the workforce to do so. 
3. “Cease dependence on inspection”. If variation is reduced, there is no need to inspect manufactured items for defects, because there won’t be any. 
4. “Move towards a single supplier for any one item”. Multiple suppliers mean variation between feed-stocks. 
5. “Improve constantly and forever”. Constantly strive to reduce variation. 
6. “Institute training on the job”. If people are inadequately trained, they will not all work the same way, and this will introduce variation. 
7. “Institute leadership”. Deming makes a distinction between leadership and mere supervision. The later is quota-and Target-based. 
8. “Drive out fear”. Deming sees management by fear as counter-productivity in the long term, because it prevents workers from acting in the organisation’s best interests. 
9. “Break down barriers between departments”. Another ideas central to TQM is the concept of the ‘internal customer’, that each department serves not the management, but the other departments that use its output. 
10. “Eliminate slogans”. Another central TQM idea is that its not people who makes most mistakes- its the process they are working within. Harassing the workforce without improving the process they use is counter-productivity. 
11. “Eliminate management by objectives”. Deming saw production on targets as encouraging the delivery of poor quality goods. 
12. “Remove barriers to pride of workmanship”. Many of the other problems outlined reduce workers satisfaction. 
13. “Institute education and self-improvement”. 
14. “The transformation is everyone’s job”.