The methods and tools of quality management and quality assurance have evolved over many decades to a remarkable degree of perfection. From the times of early civilization up to the industrial Revolution, quality was the responsibility of the craftsman who made the product according to his own design, or that of his customers. With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when large numbers of workers were engaged to produce similar products in large quantities, quality progressively became the responsibility of the shop foreman or supervisor, who was usually selected from among experienced workers.
In the 1930s, with the beginning of manufacture of interchangeable components, inspection departments started to be introduced in firms. Their function was mainly to sort good products from bad. Inspection departments represented the separation of the quality and production functions and brought to the scene specialized inspectors and sophisticated measuring and testing equipment. In the 1940s, with the dramatic increases in production due to the war, Statistical Quality Control techniques were introduced to reduce the cost of inspection work, which had become huge with the mass production of military products.
By the end of the 1950s, Quality Control Departments existed in most manufacturing companies. Their activities usually embraced the operational techniques applied to achieve quality, including both monitoring and corrective action. In the 1970s, led by the remarkable quality revolution in Japan, the concept of Total Quality Control gained very wide acceptance.
It asserted that quality was the result of a large number of interacting activities carried out by the different departments of the organization – activities that began with the identification of the needs of the customer or consumer and continued until assessments showed these needs had been satisfied.
The different stages involved constitute what is called the “quality loop”. The concept of departmentalized quality control had, by then, evolved to a broader concept: Quality Assurance, which was defined as “all the planned and systematic actions necessary to provide confidence that a product or service satisfies quality requirements”. This evolution of quality concepts led naturally, in the 1980s, to a further broadening of the quality concept.
Today we speak of Total Quality Management which can be applied in any organization, and is perceived as “the totality of management commitment to and implementation of its own self- defined quality policy”. It includes every aspect of the overall management function of an organization. In 1979 the member of ISO and IEC for the United Kingdom, the British Standards Institution (BSI), submitted a formal proporsal to ISO that a new technical committee should be formed to prepare International Standards relating to quality assurance techniques and practices. The new technical committee was approved and given a number (ISO/TC 176), a title (Quality Assurance) a scope, and a secretariat (Canada) according to the usual ISO/IEC procedures. Twenty member countries decided to become active participants in the work (P-members) of this new committee when it was set up and another fourteen countries opted to follow the work as observers (O-members).
Today, the number of countries actively participating in ISO/TC 176 is 42 P – members and 21 O – members. There had already been a substantial base of national experience in the UK and Canada. In the UK, the BS 5750 standards were well on their way to broad acceptance and in Canada a series of national standards known as CSA Z299 were also widely used. Naturally, there were some differences in the approaches taken in the UK and Canada, and also a recognition on both sides of the Atlantic that both sets of standards could be improved. Other countries with well-developed quality management practices such as Japan were also starting to take a knee interest, so the programme of ISO/TC 176 quickly became a substantial work effort.
The first editions of the ISO 9000 standards (9000 to 9004) were completed in 1986 and published in the early part of 1987. Up to this point, one could have said that the existence of the ISO 9000 standards was not a very unsual kind of international standardization event. A new committee had been formed, it had taken about five years to produce its first major set of standards, and we would wait and see how well these standards came to be accepted.