ABSTRACT
When these ideas were applied, quality moved from quality control, a largely on-line activity, through quality assurance to quality management, a largely off-line activity. Thus, the responsibility for quality moved both up and down within the organization, and (through robust design) backwards in the design/production/sales cycle. Quality management became an important tool throughout the world in the 1980s and 1990s with numerous successes claimed and many parallel activities, such as quality awards and international quality standards (e.g. the ISO-9000 series). “Successes” need to be treated with some caution, however, as isolating a single factor as causal in a complex, open system such as a manufacturing organization is logically quite difficult.
