Page 12 - The Handbook for Quality Management a Complete Guide to Operational Excellence

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Preface

Thank you for your interest in McGraw Hill’s The Handbook for Quality
Management.
The original version of the text, first released in 1996 by Quality
Publishing, was written exclusively by Tom Pyzdek. I had the pleasure of
editing a revision released in 2000, which included Six Sigma and Lean
method chapters (written by myself), as well as Bill Dettmer’s Constraint
Management material, which is repeated in this edition. The early editions
sold several thousand copies by the end of 2000, establishing the Handbook
as an essential desktop reference for the quality professional.
The earlier versions relied heavily on the American Society for Quality
(ASQ) body of knowledge for quality managers, even to the extent that
the chapter headings and sub-headings matched those in the body of
knowledge. Although this may have helped those seeking to check off
items they learned, it tended to disrupt the flow of the topics. A main
objective of this edition was the reorganization of the material into more
naturally flowing discussions of the concepts and methods essential to
quality management and operational excellence. For those who want to
use this as a reference for the ASQ CMQ/OE exam, the information is still
in the book, with sample questions at the back, and answers available on
the affiliated website: www.mhprofessional.com/HQM2
The essential body of knowledge for achieving operational excellence
is heavily influenced by the works of Deming and Juran, most of which
date from the period of 1950 through the mid 1980s. These authors spent
their careers advocating a scientific approach to quality, displacing the
widely held notion that quality assurance inspections prevalent in the
post-war era were sufficient or even credible approaches to achieving
quality.
Over the last 40 years, the quality management discipline has undergone
steady evolution from internally focused command-and-control to more
proactive, customer-focused functions. The market certainly encouraged
that, as economies shifted from dominance of product-based manufacturers

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