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This article is about quality in the general and pragmatic sense. For other uses, see Quality (disambiguation).
Quality in everyday life and business, engineering and manufacturing has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority, superiority or usefulness of something. This is the most common interpretation of the term.

Many different techniques and concepts have evolved to improve product or service quality, including SPC, Zero Defects, Six Sigma, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, quality circles, TQM, Theory of Constraints (TOC),Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000 and others) and continuous improvement.

The meaning for the term quality has developed over time. Various interpretations are given below:
  1. ISO 9000 - "Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfills requirements"
  2. (Philip B. Crosby in the 1980s)- "Conformance to requirements". The difficulty with this is that the requirements may not fully represent customer expectations; Crosby treats this as a separate problem.
  3. (Joseph M. Juran).- "Fitness for use". Fitness is defined by the customer.
  4. (Noriaki Kano and others)- A two-dimensional model of quality. The quality has two dimensions: "must-be quality" and "attractive quality". The former is near to the "fitness for use" and the latter is what the customer would love, but has not yet thought about. Supporters characterize this model more succinctly as: "Products and services that meet or exceed customers' expectations".
  5. (Gerald M. Weinberg)- "Value to some person".
  6. (W. Edwards Deming)- "Quality and the Required Style of Management" 1988 See http://www.deming.org/. "Costs go down and productivity goes up, as improvement of quality is accomplished by better management of design, engineering, testing and by improvement of processes. Better quality at lower price has a chance to capture a market. Cutting costs without improvement of quality is futile."
  7. (Genichi Taguchi). "The loss a product imposes on society after it is shipped". Taguchi's definition of quality is based on a more comprehensive view of the production system.
  8. Energy quality, associated with both the energy engineering of industrial systems and the qualitative differences in the trophic levels of an ecosystem.
  9. One key distinction to make is there are two common applications of the term Quality as form of activity or function within a business. One is Quality Assurance which is the "prevention of defects", such as the deployment of a Quality Management System and preventative activities like FMEA. The other is Quality Control which is the "detection of defects", most commonly associated with testing which takes place within a Quality Management System typically referred to as Verification and Validation.


American Society for Quality Source: [1] "a subjective term for which each person has his or her own definition. In technical usage, quality can have two meanings:
  1. the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.
  2. a product or service free of deficiencies."


The quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service meets the customer's expectations. Quality has no specific meaning unless related to a specific function and/or object. Quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute.

The dimensions of quality refer to the attributes that quality achieves in Operations Management
  • Quality supports dependability
  • Dependability supports Speed
  • Speed supports Flexibility
  • Flexibility supports Cost.
Quality <-> Dependability <-> Speed <-> Flexibility <-> Cost


In the manufacturing industry it is commonly stated that “Quality drives productivity”. Improved productivity is a source of greater revenues, employment opportunities and technological advances. Most discussions of quality refer to a finished part, wherever it is in the process. Inspection, which is what quality insurance usually means, is historical, since the work is done. The best way to think about quality is in process control. If the process is under control, inspection is not necessary.

However, there is one characteristic of modern quality that is universal. In the past, when we tried to improve quality, typically defined as producing fewer defective parts, we did so at the expense of increased cost, increased task time, longer cycle time, etc. We could not get fewer defective parts and lower cost and shorter cycle times, and so on. However, when modern quality techniques are applied correctly to business, engineering, manufacturing or assembly processes, all aspects of quality - customer satisfaction and fewer defects/errors and cycle time and task time/productivity and total cost, etc.- must all improve or, if one of these aspects does not improve, it must at least stay stable and not decline. So modern quality has the characteristic that it creates AND-based benefits, not OR-based benefits.

The most progressive view of quality is that it defined entirely by the customer or end user and is based upon that person's evaluation of his or her entire customer experience. The customer experience is the aggregate of all the touch points that customers have with the company's product and services, and is by definition a combination of these. For example, any time one buys a product one forms an impression based on how it was sold, how it was delivered, how it performed, how well it was supported etc.

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Quality can refer to:
  • Practical interpretation - The achievement or excellence of an object (good quality ice - i.e. not of inferior grade). See quality
  • Metaphysical interpretation - The meaning of excellence itself.

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  • In ordinary usage, pragmatism refers to behavior which temporarily sets aside one ideal to pursue a lesser, more achievable ideal.
  • A pre-20th century usage of the term pragmatist

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In economics, utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction or desiredness from consumption of goods. Given this measure, one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility, and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase one's utility.
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Statistical Process Control (SPC) is an effective method of monitoring a process through the use of control charts. By collecting data from samples at various points within the process, variations in the process that may affect the quality of the end product or service can be
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"Zero Defects" is a notional quality standard developed by Phil Crosby. Although applicable to any type of enterprise, it has been primarily adopted within industry supply chains wherever large volumes of components are being purchased (common items such as nuts and bolts are good
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Six Sigma is a set of practices originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects.[1] A defect is defined as nonconformity of a product or service to its specifications.
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A Quality Circle is a volunteer group composed of workers, or even a group of students nowadays, who meet together to discuss workplace improvement, and make presentations to management with their ideas, especially relating to quality of output.
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Theory of Constraints (TOC) is an overall management philosophy that aims to continually achieve more of the goal of a system. If that system is a for-profit business, then the goal is to make more money, both now and in future.
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original research or unverifiable claims.
* It may be confusing or unclear for some readers.
* It may require general cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.

Please help [ improve the article] or discuss these issues on the talk page.
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ISO 9000 is a family of standards for quality management systems. ISO 9000 is maintained by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization and is administered by accreditation and certification bodies.
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Kaizen (改善, Japanese for "change for the better" or "improvement"; the English translation is "continuous improvement" or "continual improvement").

In the context of this article, Kaizen refers to a workplace 'quality' strategy and is often associated with the
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ISO 9000 is a family of standards for quality management systems. ISO 9000 is maintained by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization and is administered by accreditation and certification bodies.
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Philip B. "Phil" Crosby, (June 18, 1926–August 18, 2001) was a businessman and author who contributed to management theory and quality management practices.

Crosby initiated the Zero Defects program at the Martin Company Orlando, Florida plant [1].
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worldwide view of the subject.
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This article may contain original research or unverified claims.
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customer is someone who makes use of or receives the products or services of an individual or organization. The word historically derives from "custom," meaning "habit"; a customer was someone who frequented a particular shop, who made it a habit to purchase goods there, and with
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Joseph Moses Juran (b. December 24, 1904) is an American industrial engineer and philanthropist.

Juran (pronounced joo-RAN; rhymes with "man") is known as a business and industrial quality "guru," while making significant contributions to management theory, human resource
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Professor Noriaki Kano is the developer of a program whose simple ranking scheme distinguishes between essential and differentiating attributes related to concepts of customer quality.
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Aspinwall Classification System (Leo Aspinwall, 1958) classifies and rates products based on five variables:
  1. Replacement rate (How frequently is the product repurchased?)
  2. Gross margin (How much profit is obtained from each product?)

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Service can refer to:
  • Public services, services carried out with the aim of providing a public good
  • A penetrant, as defined by a building code
  • Service (Systems Architecture), the provision of a discrete business or technology function within a systems environment; i.

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Gerald Marvin Weinberg ('Jerry') is an author and teacher of the psychology and anthropology of computer software development. His most well-known book is The Psychology of Computer Programming.
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William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900–December 20, 1993) was an American statistician, college professor, author, lecturer, and consultant. Deming is widely credited with improving production in the United States during World War II, although he is perhaps best known for
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Gen'ichi Taguchi (田口 玄一) (born January 1, 1924 in Tokamachi, Japan) is an engineer and statistician. From the 1950s onwards, Taguchi developed a methodology for applying statistics to improve the quality of manufactured goods.
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Energy quality the contrast between different forms of energy, the different trophic levels in ecological systems and the propensity of energy to convert from one form to another.
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American Society for Quality (ASQ), formerly known as American Society for Quality Control (ASQC), is a knowledge-based global community of quality control experts, with nearly 100,000 members dedicated to the promotion and advancement of quality tools, principles, and
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Operations management is an area of business that is concerned with the production of goods and services, and involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient and effective.
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Revenue is a business term for the amount of money that a company receives from its activities in a given period, mostly from sales of products and/or services to customers.
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Customer satisfaction, a business term, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. It is seen as a key performance indicator within business and is part of the four perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard.
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In logic and/or mathematics, logical conjunction or and is a two-place logical operation that results in a value of true if both of its operands are true, otherwise a value of false!

Definition

Logical conjunction
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Quality management is a method for ensuring that all the activities necessary to design, develop and implement a product or service are effective and efficient with respect to the system and its performance.

Quality Improvement

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