History of quality assurance pdf

The beginning of the 20th century marked the inclusion of "processes" in quality practices. A "process" is defined as a group of activities that takes an input, adds value to it, and provides an output. Walter Shewhart began to focus on controlling processes in the mids, making quality relevant not only for the finished product but for the processes that created it.

Shewhart recognized that industrial processes yield data. Shewhart determined this data could be analyzed using statistical techniques to see whether a process is stable and in control, or if it is being affected by special causes that should be fixed.

In doing so, Shewhart laid the foundation for control charts , a modern-day quality tool. Edwards Deming , a statistician with the U. The birth of total quality in the United States was in direct response to a quality revolution in Japan following World War II, as major Japanese manufacturers converted from producing military goods for internal use to producing civilian goods for trade.

At first, Japan had a widely held reputation for shoddy exports, and their goods were shunned by international markets. This led Japanese organizations to explore new ways of thinking about quality.

The Japanese welcomed input from foreign companies and lecturers, including two American quality experts:. Rather than relying purely on product inspection, Japanese manufacturers focused on improving all organizational processes through the people who used them. As a result, Japan was able to produce higher-quality exports at lower prices, benefiting consumers throughout the world. At first, U. This, of course, did nothing to improve American competitiveness in quality.

As years passed, price competition declined while quality competition continued to increase. The chief executive officers of major U. The U. Translate PDF. Faculty of engineering. Structural engineering program Quality control basics and systems. And in order to do that, a new science called Quality control was introduced. And in order to manage quality effectively, it should be understood clearly.

Quality control, or QC for short, is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. Quality assurance QA refers to the planned and systematic activities implemented in a quality system so that quality requirements for a product or service will be fulfilled.

In this publication you will find two main tracks of discussion, the quality control procedures in construction field, and also you will find its procedures in project management field in scale of planning, execution, and control.

Also you will find a brief about types of sources of specifications. Also the methodology of six sigma which is mainly used to optimize the quality of production.

A standard is a detailed statement of requirements. The primary types of technical standards are: A standard specification is an explicit set of requirements for an item, material, component, system or service.

It is often used to formalize the technical aspects of a procurement agreement or contract. For example, there may be a specification for a turbine blade for a jet engine which defines the exact material and performance requirements.

It may involve making a careful personal observation or conducting a highly technical measurement. For example, a physical property of a material is often affected by the precise method of testing: any reference to the property should therefore reference the test method used. A standard practice or procedure gives a set of instructions for performing operations or functions. For example, there are detailed standard operating procedures for operation of a nuclear power plant.

A standard guide is general information or options which do not require a specific course of action. A standard definition is formally established terminology. Standard units, in physics and applied mathematics, are commonly accepted measurements of physical quantities. And when it comes to specifications there are mainly two types: Performance Specifications and design Specifications.

Importance of specifications: Presence of international standard specifications is very important and vital nowadays due to the following reasons: 1- Standards facilitate communication and prevent misunderstanding. QC activities include general methods such as accuracy checks on data acquisition and calculations and the use of approved standardized procedures for emission calculations, measurements, estimating uncertainties, archiving information and reporting.

Higher tier QC activities include technical reviews of source categories, activity and emission factor data, and methods. Anne Corbett. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Today, it is hard to find even one among the almost 50 countries which have signed the Bologna Declaration — which specified quality assurance as one of its action lines — that has not estab- lished a national system for quality assurance Westerheijden et al.

The methods used for quality assurance in Europe are diverse: internal and external assessment of programmes or institutions i.

Furthermore, different countries give different interpretations to quality assurance concepts. An additional difficulty in assessing the literature is that many studies consider changes in quality assurance as if they took place in a bubble, ignoring the intervening factors that could explain why quality assurance devel- opment emerged at particular times in particular countries and why these devel- opments may have many different intentions and purposes.

This is consistent with a neo-liberal move to deregulation. It has often been argued that the establishment and further development of quality assurance schemes involve finding a balance between improvement and accountability Thune Hence, the aim of this article is to identify and clarify these dynamics of quality assurance in terms that make sense for a comparative study. Accepting that attempts to model policy developments have the advantage of parsimony and the disadvantage of having the evidence squeezed to suit the model Ragin, , this article conducts the argument in three stages.

First, it suggests a typology of change that combines insights from the area of policy analysis and organisational theory. Second, it applies these concepts in brief historical overviews of the development of quality assurance in three countries to provide some empirical illustrations as to how and why quality assurance schemes developed.

Third, it discusses the weak- nesses and strengths of such a typology in relation to more conventional political science accounts of policy change and suggests approaches for the future. Following this logic, one can deduce from existing scholarship and research in policy analysis that there are two ideal-type positions on the relation- ship between a policy problem and a policy solution. This is often termed as a stagist approach, describing the policy process as a series of steps or sequences that is logically derived from information stemming from earlier stages.

They argued for a model in which quality assurance policy problems and quality assurance policy solutions were closely linked. The main assumption is that quality assurance schemes operate in a social context in which there is a phased connection between a policy problem and its possible solution.

It is characterised by the step-wise, non-contentious and perhaps even technical Skolnik, improvement of quality assurance schemes designed to improve teaching and learning. Dill and Soo , p. The alternative perspective drops the assumption of close links between quality assurance arrangements and actual problems to be solved. The adoption of quality assurance schemes becomes a process of copying instruments and policies that exist elsewhere, or to legitimate political action regardless of its actual effect.

Sometimes political action takes place under what is in effect coercion stating, e. Hood , p. For this article, the significance of this perspective is that quality assurance schemes are a means of achieving external legitimation.

It assumes that politicians and external stakeholders also are accountable for their actions to an audience that does not have expert knowledge to judge the effectiveness and efficiency of poli- cies. Whether a quality assurance model actually solves quality problems in higher education is less important than whether it looks good and fashionable in the eyes of the relevant constituencies.

As with the stagist perspective, the symbolic perspective comes in two versions. Fashion in policy is related to the exogenous political context and is subject to change as a consequence of electoral and governmental changes. However, in the order of things in the real world, higher education is not an object about which audiences mostly agree. Often, the general audience hardly watches and whatever happens on stage is of little interest to the public image of decision-makers, but if it does, stakeholder groups holding different ideological, political opinions sway the tastes of parts of the general audience.

We are aware that in defining a matrix of these four models we have sketched only one of many possible ways to organise them. However, in the interests of experiment, we use our four categories to identify four different explanations as to how quality assurance schemes develop Figure 1.

The first dimension has been described before as varying from a close relationship between quality assurance models and the social problems to be solved on the left to a de-coupled relation between the two on the right. The other dimension of the matrix concerns the degree of politicisation: from consensual or harmonious views on the top to more conflictual or strongly politicised relationships at the bottom. An explanatory model of the development of quality assurance policy Applying the Model to the Development of Quality Assurance in The Netherlands, Norway and Portugal In this section, we attempt to apply our typology to the development of quality assurance schemes in three countries over the past 20 to 25 years.

They are the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal, a choice justified by pointing to their variation in three respects.

First, they are geographically diverse so as to avoid the problem of neighbouring countries tending to develop joint characteristics Stensaker, They differ with respect to political culture, history, and policy styles. Second, they have very different higher education systems.

Umbrella organisations of higher education institutions co-ordinated their own evolving national schemes. Main method: programme evaluation. New, bi-national co-ordination agency Dutch-Flemish established by law , spurred by the Bologna Process. Main method: programme accreditation. Efficiency-enhancing measures and effort to regain improvement perspective, within the same broad framework. Main methods: programme accreditation and institutional audit.

It was a reaction to a politically turbulent period in which ad hoc committees had been instituted to recommend specific budget cuts, including closing some university faculties. The outcome was the agreement to adopt the improvement-oriented US approach of programme self-evaluation and external evaluation of institutions, rather than the then newly-established UK approach of programme assessments.

Colleges, which had just merged into four-year bachelor institutions out of small vocational schools, at first favoured an institutional approach, but later opted for programme evaluation as more appropriate for the newly-established institutions.