Quality Planning and Assurance

Foreword

After graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan, I served as a faculty member and taught quality-related courses for over 40 years. I have consulted for Fortune 500 and smaller companies, the US State Department, and the US Army. Author of over 50 published papers and book chapters, I also directed more than 100 student graduate theses with nearly all research done in industry on quality-related problems.

For the retail consumer or casual observer, quality planning might seem a highly technical and completely boring topic with little relevance to the hyperspeed changes in the global pandemic-driven economy of 2021. However, in the view of this author, the “on-demand” and “customer-centric” economy and our expectations of online shopping and immediate delivery fueled by highly effective global supply chains has its antecedents going back at least to the groundbreaking published work on quality planning by Joseph Juran in the 1960s.

With little competition in the post-WWII boom, US monopolies and oligopolies “pushed” what they had the expertise to produce onto customers who had little choice in the marketplace. In the 1950s, the vacuum cleaner was a “Hoover,” a refrigerator was a “Frigidaire,” there were three television networks, the “Big Three” auto manufacturers in Detroit, and one telephone company. The recession of the 1970s triggered by OPEC’s monopoly breaking “fuel crisis” ended the post-war boom and drove a ...