Quality management

There is a vital need for greater national coordination of the professional organisations on which our industry is dependent

In his interesting article “Innovation to boost economy,” Iain Gray, chief executive of the Technology Strategy Board, stresses the importance of high-value manufacturing as a key strand of government investment in growth. But he makes no mention of the importance of quality management in achieving that objective.

The economic importance of quality management can be identified in 20th-century industrial history. After Japan lost the Second World War, their industry won the post-war peace by penetrating international markets with high-quality products at competitive prices. Evidence of their success can still be seen on our roads and in high street shops. In achieving this victory they were assisted by two distinguished American specialists in statistical quality control and quality management.

American advice was also available to British industry through the medium of an Anglo-American Productivity Council, but this was abandoned for lack of support in the UK. The British engineering profession continued its established practice of setting tight tolerances without regard to the statistical aspects of process data and then adopting a do as you are told attitude to factory operators. This was not only bad for industrial relations, it was damaging to quality. Frequent process adjustment to compensate for fall-out on tight upper and lower limits generated more (not less) variability.

A contributory factor was the intellectual gulf between the engineering and statistical professions. Statistical textbooks crammed full of the complex mathematical theory of probability were not easy reading for engineers. Many engineers were opposed to the application of statistical methods, saying they only caused confusion.

The Royal Statistical Society did its best to overcome the problem. In the early 1970s it launched a journal, Applied Statistics, to promote the use of statistical methods by other professions. In 1957 it published an article showing how engineers designing and developing products could anticipate and resolve quality problems before launching into production. But this was ignored by British engineers until the article was identified in 1995 in an American quality journal as important and much neglected, anticipating Japanese developments by more than a decade.

Gray says he is keen to hear what readers think. I think there is an urgent need for the practical skills of statistical engineering and quality management to be included in the curricula of all engineering degree courses so that our economy will benefit from new generations of young engineers better equipped to serve manufacturing industry than their 20th-century predecessors. There is also a vital need for greater national coordination of the multitude of professional organisations on which our industry is dependent. Compare that with the Japanese Union of Science and Technology – the whole of science and technology under one hat!

S J Morrison, Kirkella, East Yorkshire