Quality management – history and trends

The continuous development of quality management in organizations was driven on the one hand by competition and on the other hand by growing requirements of the customers. Mass production with a pure push strategy changed to a more and more pull strategy with higher customer and market orientation. To satisfy the requirements of the triangle quality, cost and time the field of view of quality management has continuously been widened from considering “what” is done to “how” it is done. Nowadays the complexity and interrelations inside and outside of organizations increased with their global orientation. To face these global challenges, the purpose of this paper is to do a detailed analysis of the history of quality management that can support the initial position in development of specific tools and methods for quality improvement in organizations.

For the historic analysis a well-founded literature review has been performed. After presenting the historical development of quality management, the current situation described. Finally an outlook for upcoming trends in quality management is provided by extrapolating current developments.

Four different paradigm shifts in quality management are up to now identified and described, accompanied by a high number of smaller development steps. Current efforts for the further development of quality management encompass “perceived quality”, “human-focused quality management” and “intelligent quality management”.

The paper gives a survey on the development of quality management and delivers a forecast on future requirements and trends in structuring the quality management in technical enterprises.