Facilities Manager's Desk Reference, 3rd Edition

37Quality Management

37.1 Origins

Quality management (QM) has developed over the past 60 years as countries and organisations have endeavoured to remain competitive in a global economy. The father of quality, W. Deming, encouraged the Japanese to adopt a systematic statistical approach to problem solving in the post‐war rebuilding of Japan. This approach later became known as the Deming or PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Action) cycle. He encouraged senior managers to become actively involved in their company’s quality improvement programmes. His theories place great importance and responsibility on management, at the individual, company and society levels. Other quality concepts were introduced by others such as Juran, Shingo, Crosby, Feigenbaum and Ishikawa – these concepts include quality spirals, zero defects, poka‐yoke, the fishbone diagram and quality circles.

37.2 Quality

The noun ‘quality’ means basic nature or character. In recent years, its adjectival form has been used incorrectly to indicate a degree of excellence or superiority, such as in ‘quality managed facilities’. Here, the word ‘quality’ really needs an additional qualifying adjective such as ‘high’ or ‘low’ to indicate benchmarks of achievement. However, the noun phrases ‘quality management’, ‘quality control’ and ‘quality assurance’ are now fully established in business management jargon. It is, however, still important in FM (facilities management, or facilities manager) contexts to ensure that quality is a relative ...