Quality philosophies and approaches

By : M .Blessy MS Forensic Pharmacy

Historical background:
Garvin said that quality has moved through four distinct quality era: The inspection era The quality control era The quality assurance era Strategic quality management

THE INSPECTION ERA

Quality has been a great concern of people throughout recorded history. The king Hammurabi of Babylon made The Code of Hammurabi which stated the death of builders whose buildings collapsed and killed its occupants. Before Industrial revolution, items were produced by individual craftsmen according to the need of customs. If any quality issues arised regarding the product the customer would directy go to the producer.

 With industrial revolution came the concept of mass production. Eli Whitney proposed a new approach for manufacturing muskets. Rather than preparaing each musket individually he used a preestablished sequence of operations that would be performed by men on special machineries to produced parts that are identical to each other.

 Advantages: If any weapon required replacements ,they could be obtained from an inventory of spares. So no need to remake that part. People with less skill could carry out the operation so labour cost got reduced. Increase in productivity. The whole production had only one aim to produce products that were ,to an extent possible, identical to each other. Lot of effort was put to achieve this goal.

THE QUALITY CONTROL ERA

THE QUALITY ASSURANCE ERA