ABSTRACT
The concept of the quality assurance, especially recognizing statistics as a major instrument in achieving it, got momentum after development of the mass production, which became possible after widespread use of steam and electricity in the industry (Özilgen 2011a). During the industrial revolution, supervision of the workers and controlling the quality of the work done were the foremen’s responsibility. As shop departments became larger and as products became more complex, the work needed to assure the quality expanded beyond the part-time capacity of the shop foreman. To meet the expanded need, the foremen first appointed men to serve as part-time inspectors and later with further expansion as full time (Juran 1973). In the years 1920-1930, the quality control units, to which the inspectors were reporting, grew to such a level that their organization became independent from the production and they had their own administrators. In this period, minimizing the expenses for discard or remanufacturing of the products that fail to meet the quality criteria became the major goal of efforts for quality control. Statistics became a major instrument to visualize and analyze the data pertinent to systems processing large masses. One of the major reasons making statistics an important instrument was the destruction of the samples in some analysis to assess the quality. Therefore, sampling techniques were developed to carry out the analysis on a small number of samples, and then the results obtained with the samples were related statistically to the entire production (Özilgen 2011b). During World War II, Walter Shewhart of the Bell Telephone Laboratories established the concept of modern statistical quality control to reduce the failure of the components that were especially difcult to repair when buried underground (Anonymous 2011).
