Quality is a measure of standard against something else of a similar kind. The aspect is considered a management discipline as it ensures products and services are up to par with the set standards. To understand the development of quality, it’s paramount to look for its history in medieval time. The quality movement can be traced back to the late 13 th century in medieval Europe where civilization is said to have originated from (Hellman & Liu, 2013). This is the same time when craftsmen began to organize themselves into unions called guilds which were responsible for formulating rules meant for product and service quality. The rules were strict and enforced by inspection committees whereby they would mark flawless goods with a special mark to show that they have passed the quality check.
Fast forward to the 19 th century and the industrial revolution happened in different parts of the world. Craftsmanship continued with the medieval quality framework until the craftsmen had to adopt working in factories due to industrialization (Crafts, 2005). The factory system had to change quality management to become a full-fledged department however still run by craftsmen. In a further ploy to improve quality and production, Fredrick W Taylor formulated the Taylor system which employed specialized engineers to formulate and run processes that would facilitate both quality and productivity. Craftsmen fell back and took on the positions of technicians and supervisors.
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The 20 th century fomented the focus on processes that would maintain good quality. Therefore, rather than focus on the outcome of a product or service, the quality was expanded to the processes that engaged in making the products (van Kemenade & Hardjono, 2019). If the process was finite and accurate towards making quality products then manufacturers did not need to focus on the end product but the initial processes and ingredients of the product. The phenomenon was a Total Quality Management approach to processing.
References
Hellman, P., & Liu, Y. (2013). Development of Quality Management Systems: How Have Disruptive Technological Innovations in Quality Management Affected Organizations? Quality Innovation Prosperity , 17 (1). https://doi.org/10.12776/qip.v17i1.154
Crafts, N. (2005). The First Industrial Revolution: Resolving the Slow Growth/Rapid Industrialization Paradox. Journal of the European Economic Association , 3 (2/3), 525–534. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40004995?seq=1
van Kemenade, E., & Hardjono, T. W. (2019). Twenty-first-century Total Quality Management: the Emergence Paradigm. The TQM Journal , 31 (2), 150–166. https://doi.org/10.1108/tqm-04-2018-0045
