Quality management can be considered to have three main components: quality control, quality assurance and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product quality, but also the means to achieve it. Quality management therefore Management quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality.

 Quality management evolution

 Quality management is a recent phenomenon. Advanced civilizations that supported the arts and crafts allowed clients to choose goods meeting higher quality standards than normal goods. In societies where art and craft (and craftsmanship) were valued, one of the responsibilities of a master craftsman (and similarly for artists) was to lead their studio, train and supervise the work of their craftsmen and apprentices. The master craftsman set standards, reviewed the work of others and ordered rework and revision as necessary. One of the limitations of the craft approach was that relatively few goods could be produced; on the other hand an advantage was that each item produced could be individually shaped to suit the client. This craft based approach to quality and the practices used were major inputs when quality management was created as a management science.

     * Break down barriers between departments

    * Management should learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership

    * Improve constantly

    * Institute a programme of education and self-improvement

 Customers recognize that quality is an important attribute in products and services. Suppliers recognize that quality can be an important differentiator between their own offerings and those of competitors (quality differentiation is also called the quality gap). In the past two decades this quality gap has been greatly reduced between competitive products and services. This is partly due to the contracting (also called outsourcing) of manufacture to countries like India and China, as well internationalization of trade and competition. These countries amongst many others have raised their own standards of quality in order to meet International standards and customer demands. The ISO 9000 series of standards are probably the best known International standards for quality management.

 There are a huge number of books available on quality. In recent times some themes have become more significant including quality culture, the importance of knowledge management, and the role of leadership in promoting and achieving high quality. Disciplines like systems thinking are bringing more holistic approaches to quality so that people, process and products are considered together rather than independent factors in quality management.

 The influence of quality thinking has spread to non-traditional applications outside of walls of manufacturing, extending into service sectors and into areas such as sales, marketing and customer service [1].

   Quality improvement

 There are many methods for quality improvement. These cover product improvement, process improvement and people based improvement. In the following list are methods of quality management and techniques that incorporate and drive quality improvement—

    1. Guidelines for performance improvement.

   2. Information technology — Process assessment — Part 4: Guidance on use for process improvement and process capability determination.

   3. QFD — Quality Function Deployment, also known as the House of Quality approach.

   4. Kaizen — 改善, Japanese for change for the better; the common English usage is continual improvement.

   5. Zero Defect Program — created by NEC Corporation of Japan, based upon Statistical Process Control and one of the inputs for the inventors of Six Sigma.

   7. PDCA — Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle for quality control purposes. (Six Sigma's DMAIC method (Design, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) may be viewed as a particular implementation of this.)

   8. Quality circle — a group (people oriented) approach to improvement..

   9. Taguchi methods — statistical oriented methods including Quality robustness, Quality loss function and Target specifications.

  10. The Toyota Production System — reworked in the west into Lean Manufacturing.

  11. An approach that focuses on capturing customer emotional feedback about products to drive improvement.

  13. TRIZ — meaning "Theory of inventive problem solving"                          

  14. BPR — Business process reengineering, a management approach aiming at 'clean slate' improvements).

 Proponents of each approach have sought to improve them as well as apply them to enterprise types not originally targeted. For example, Six Sigma was designed for manufacturing but has spread to service enterprises. Each of these approaches and methods has met with success but also with failures.

 Some of the common differentiators between success and failure include commitment, knowledge and expertise to guide improvement, scope of change/improvement desired (Big Bang type changes tend to fail more often compared to smaller changes) and adaption to enterprise cultures. For example, quality circles do not work well in every enterprise (and are even discouraged by some managers), and relatively few TQM-participating enterprises have won the national quality awards.

 There have been well publicized failures of BPR, as well as Six Sigma. Enterprises therefore need to consider carefully which quality improvement methods to adopt, and certainly should not adopt all those listed here.

 It is important not to underestimate the people factors, such as culture, in selecting a quality improvement approach. Any improvement (change) takes time to implement, gain acceptance and stabilize as accepted practice. Improvement must allow pauses between implementing new changes so that the change is stabilized and assessed as a real improvement, before the next improvement is made (hence continual improvement, not continuous improvement).

 Improvements that change the culture take longer as they have to overcome greater resistance to change. It is easier and often more effective to work within the existing cultural boundaries and make small improvements than to make major transformational changes.

 On the other hand, transformational change works best when an enterprise faces a crisis and needs to make major changes in order to survive. Well organized quality improvement programs take all these factors into account when selecting the quality improvement methods.

   Quality standards

 The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) created the Quality Management System (QMS) which were applicable in different types of industries, based on the type of activity or process: designing, production or service delivery.

 The standards have been regularly reviewed every few years by the International Organization for Standardization.

 The Quality Management System standards created by ISO are meant to certify the processes and the system of an organization and not the product or service itself. Standards do not certify the quality of the product or service.

 The Software Engineering Institute has its own process assessment and improvement methods, called CMMi (Capability Maturity Model — integrated) and IDEAL respectively.

 Quality terms

     * Quality Improvement can be distinguished from Quality Control in that Quality Improvement is the purposeful change of a process to improve the reliability of achieving an outcome.

    * Quality Control is the ongoing effort to maintain the integrity of a process to maintain the reliability of achieving an outcome.

    * Quality Assurance is the planned or systematic actions necessary to provide enough confidence that a product or service will satisfy the given requirements for quality..