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A key goal of any company is to increase product Quality and lower production costs. ... In 1962 Ishikawa came up with the philosophy of Kaizen or Quality Circles, which Hutchins has defined as “small groups of between 3 and 12 people who do the same or similar work, voluntary meeting together regularly for about an hour per week in paid time, usually under the leadership of their own supervisor, and who are trained to identify, analyze, and solve some of the problems in their work, presenting solutions to management, and where possible, implementing the solution themselves” (Hutchins, 1). ... To have properly implemented Quality Circles, much has to be known and understood about them. I will be going over how they came about in Japan and the migration to America, how they work, what they do, the roles of management, supervisors and unions, the benefits and rewards, and the problems with Quality Circles. ... To them this included discharging their reputation for cheap and poor Quality products and instead emerging as competitive in the international markets. ... The emergence of Quality Control Programs improved standardization and Quality, making them extremely effective because they benefited the workers and management and as a result the consumers. The Quality Control Circles (QCC) really helped Japan to lead the world in Quality.
Ishikawa the founding father of Quality Circles listed six of the most relevant elements of the Circles as: company wide Quality control, an emphasis on education and training, QCC activities, application of statistical methods, the Quality control audit, and nation wide Quality control promotion activities. Basically what all these work together to say are that Circles must be a way of life, not just something additional to the normal management scheme. This new way of living, in terms of the company, still holds that productivity is the key to survival in international competition and that to be successful the QCC’s need to be well organized, that management needs to perform frequent Quality audits, that workers need to learn statistical control methods, there needs to be an emphasis on training and that this scheme is to be promoted nation wide. Ishikawa’s principles of Quality Circles will come up again later in…
Quality Circle’s naturally progress through phases. There are four possible phases however not all Circles will reach the fourth, that is up to the complete discretion of the management. Once the Circle’s have been established as far as the number of Circles and the supervisor and workers have been selected you can begin training to be able to identify, analyze and solve problems in the groups respective work area. In this Initial Phase the Circle deals with typical problems and the Quality of work life in general. ... Quality Circles that make it to the fourth phase, self-control, are relatively autonomous and are highly respected by management since they will be looking to fix and better situations. One of the things the Circles will be looking for is how to continue the development of the Circles beyond the final phase. ... These phases depict the life cycle, however they say very little about what Quality Circles meetings do.
Approximate Word count = 2627
Approximate Pages = 10.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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