Qualilty Assurance and auto industry

PRODUCT QUALITY SPECIFICATION AND CONTROL

The accent on quality was lost in American industry in the postWorld War II era, when the country's industry could sell almost anything that it made, at a time when the quality level of foreign made products was of no great worry (Halberstam, 1986, p. 313). To be sure, there were advocates of quality control in the United States (US), such as Edwards Deming; however, American industry was in no mood to listen to them. Unfortunately for American industry, someone else did listen to Deming  the Japanese. The superior quality control procedures of today's Japanese industry were originally developed under the guidance and tutelage of Edwards Deming (p. 314). Further, the statistical and mathematical element of Deming's procedures, and, in turn, those of Japanese industry, were based on the work of another American quality control expert, Walter Shewhart (p. 314).

Deming insisted that true quality control began with a real commitment from top management.

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s North American plants only in 1984. A sign throughout the American automobile manufacturing industry of the downgrading of product quality was managerial salaries. A production manager could expect to spend years reaching the middlemanagement level, and, in the early1980s, could expect an average annual salary of about $40,000. By contrast, a good financial manager could expect rapid advancement to executivelist level, where total compensation would likely exceed $150,000 annually (Halberstam, 1986, p. 501). By the early1980s, product quality had become a major problem at all American automobile manufacturers, but especially so at Ford and Chrysler. Rather than initiating a quality improvement program, both Ford and Chrysler, now under Iacocca's leadership, sought, and received from the freetrade Reagan Administration, governmental protection from higher quality imports. General Motors opposed this governmental intervention. Their opposition was probably not so much based on a belief that the company's product quality would permit it to compete effectively with the Japanese, as it was on a desire to see domestic competition fatally crippled. Ford and Chrysler are receiving accolades in the late1980s
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Approximate Word count = 1976
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)