POV: date=December 2007

In engineering and manufacturing, quality control and quality engineering are involved in developing systems to ensure products or services are designed and produced to meet or exceed customer requirements. These systems are often developed in conjunction with other business and engineering disciplines using a cross-functional approach.

History

When the first specialized craftsmen arose manufacturing tools for others, the principle of quality control was simple: "let the buyer beware" (caveat emptor).

Early civil engineering projects, however, needed to be built to specifications. For instance, the four sides of the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza are perpendicular to within 3.5 arcseconds.

During the Middle Ages, guilds took the responsibility of quality control upon themselves.

Royal governments purchasing material were interested in quality control as customers. For instance, King John of England appointed a certain William Wrotham to supervise the construction and repair of ships. Some centuries later, but also in England, Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty, appointed multiple such overseers.

The Industrial Revolution led to a system in which large groups of people performing a similar type of work were grouped together under the supervision of a foreman who also took on the responsibility to control the quality of work manufactured.

Quality Assurance has developed a good deal during the last 80-90 years (in about 20 year intervals) from its inception to the current state of the art.

Wartime production

During World War I, the manufacturing process became more complex, and foremen began to supervise large numbers of workers to ensure the quality of the work being produced. This period also introduced mass production and piecework, which created quality problems as workmen could now earn more money by the production of extra products, which in turn led to bad workmanship being passed on to the assembly lines.

Due to the large amount of bad workmanship being produced, the first full time inspectors were introduced into the large-scale modern factory. These full time inspectors were the real beginning of inspection quality control, and this was the beginning of the large inspection organizations of the 1920s and 1930s, which were separately organised from production and big enough to be headed by superintendents.

The systematic approach to quality started in industrial manufacture during the 1930s, mostly in the USA, when some attention was given to the cost of scrap and rework. With the impact of mass production, which was required during the Second World War, it became necessary to introduce a more stringent form of quality control which can be identified as Statistical Quality Control, or SQC. Some of the initial work for SQC is credited to Walter A. Shewhart of Bell Labs, starting with his famous one-page memorandum of 1924.