This chapter presents the historical overview of how quality became a major, strategic, management and business tool in the United States and other parts of the world. It explains the meaning of the term "quality"—a consensus definition of the term is necessary to discuss the topic and benefit from it and then the need for a total quality system and an associated management philosophy for achieving quality in products. The chapter focuses on how the Quality control circles are formed, trained, and operated. A quality cost analysis accumulates the economic losses incurred by an organization due to not producing quality products and adds to it the costs incurred in efforts for making the products quality-products. The chapter provides a discussion on how quality impacts the economic performance of an enterprise, which includes a discussion on quality cost analysis. It also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.