ABSTRACT
The concept of using systemic business control frameworks to assist management in carrying out business activities has been around for twenty-five centuries (Figure 2.1).
Some feel that a significant moment in the history of Business Control was on 14 October 1900 in Sioux City, Iowa and the birth of W. Edwards Deming (Figure 2.2).
Deming trained to be an electrical engineer and received a Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Yale. He worked briefly as an engineer in Chicago before becoming a statistician, working in the US Bureau of Census. But fortunately for the world, his continuous quest for understanding deviation from the norm led him to become one of the founding fathers of the quality movement. After World War II he was sent to work in Japan and it was there in the 1950s that he developed, together with fellow American, Joseph Juran, production and management theories that later became known as the ‘right first time’ philosophy in Japanese industry. Leading industrialists credited them with giving birth to an industrial revolution through the way they developed statistical control of quality levels into a new way of managing business.
