If an organization wants to improve its effectiveness, efficiency, or profitability by implementing a Quality Management System (QMS), it must change or redevelop itself. This change or redevelopment "sometimes called re-engineering "will affect all aspects of the organization including management, strategic planning, implementation, the processes of innovation, and culture. The introduction of QMS in manufacturing has been likened to the start of mass production and interchangeable parts in importance. The importance of QMS to the service sector has no comparable watershed event for comparison, but it has had equal impacts on firms and organizations. This essay will consider these impacts and their apparently lasting results on the development of organizations.
QMS-drive change has come in five phases:.
1. Statistical basis for managerial decision making.
2. Creation of peer review groups, quality circles. (2-5 = emergence of the team).
3. Change in overall culture.
4. Consequences for pay structure and status within organizations.
5. Application to service organizations instead of manufacturing sector, which was original arena of implementation. (This is a special case, derived from and going beyond the original applications to manufacturing. It includes such organizations as the military.).
This essay will examine each of these phases, show their links, and parse their consequences to the development of organizations.
1. Statistical basis for managerial decision making. The application of statistical methods to industrial quality control actually began in the late 19th century and reached its peak with the efficiency expert era in the 1920s and 30s, the heyday of time-motion efficiency studies in automobile and appliance manufacturing. Great savings in labor and overall manufacturing cost resulted, but no major changes in shop floor organization or corporate organization seemed to have resulted.
