Karoru Ishikawa Contributions to Quality Control

Quality control, quality assurance, and quality management are taken for granted as essential components of organizational theory and behavior. Although Karoru Ishikawa framed quality control from a Japanese perspective, his suggestions have become entrenched in international business, particularly in manufacturing and industrial engineering sectors.

The Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) already had a quality control division in place when Ishikawa joined the organization; yet his contributions to quality control in science and engineering were so tremendous that over 50 scientists at JUSE recently contributed to a book commemorating the Ishikawa. Ishikawa’s primary contributions to quality control include integration quality control methods into organizational management and systems, particularly with regards to the concept of Total Quality Control (TQC).

The TQC concept distributes personal responsibility for quality control to each team within the organization, even within the most hierarchical and bureaucratic companies. Ishikawa also showed how TQC could provide industrial and manufacturing firms with competitive advantage. Ishikawa’s concept of TQC is explicated in his 1988 book What is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way. In this book, Ishikawa discusses first the importance of quality control as an ethical principle. Quality control is about respecting the customer, and not sacrificing quality and especially safety in large-scale production facilities.

In mass-production methods, it can be too easy to bypass quality control to rush products to market. Ishikawa illustrates why quality control is actually cost-effective and feasible to implement, even if TQC does require some changes to the organizational structure, culture, operations, and production protocols. For instance, Evans (2014) notes that TQC is a “participative” system of quality management (p. 66). Total quality control also helps an organization retain a commitment to its overall values and goals.

Organizations that implement TQC effectively can gain a competitive advantage over time, as quality adds value to a product. Therefore, another core element of Ishikawa’s TQC is related to responsibility and organizational culture. In 1991, Ishikawa (1991) published a second book entitled Guide to Quality Control, which offers quantitative analyses of different quality control methods. The principles in Guide to Quality Control can help managers and particularly financial advisers in the company to integrate TQC using evidence and statistics and not just theory.

For this reason, Ishikawa’s contributions to TQC have become legendary, and are attributed for the transformation of Japanese manufacturing from a low quality mass market production source to a source associated with high quality of manufactured goods (Suzuki, 2015). As Suzuki (2015) also points out, Ishikawa contributed to quality control improvements in Japan through regular magazine articles that helped to entrench the values and practices of TQC. Ishikawa’s cause-and-effect models are renowned (Evans, 2014, p. 66).

Because TQC is quantifiable as well as ethical, Ishikawa was able to demonstrate how it can be integrated into the managerial protocol and organizational structure even in firms with tight profit margins. A biographical analysis of Ishikawa shows how lifelong dedication to improving quality in Japan led to global transformations in the manufacturing sector. Ishikawa’s dedication to TQC has made it so that organizations around the world barely give credit to the man himself, instead taking for granted that quality control is a necessity in business.

Without Ishikawa’s commitment to the principle of quality, it is difficult.