Why Quality is Important and How It Applies in Diverse Business and Social Environments, Volume I

CHAPTER 11

Deployment for Quality

Early in the 1980s it became clear that Japan had leap-frogged the United States and many other developed countries in providing high-quality products. The videos and the messages that were promoted by the government were quite blunt—Japan was quite happy to share all they had learned—originally from the West, because they didn’t believe we would apply it and regain our competitive position in the West.

There were many names and flavours for the best practice in Japan— total quality control (TQC) and company wide quality control (CWQC) but the most important, that now plays a central role worldwide in 6-sigma (see Chapter 16 Six sigma) is quality function deployment (QFD) a technique first developed in Japan. ...