Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa Kaoru Ishikawa could possibly be one of the greatest assets to quality management that the world has ever known. He spent his entire life studying and improving the quality of products and services. He used quality principles established by others as a foundation and improved upon them. He also developed some tools that are still used today to help organizations to improve quality. He received many awards for his work in quality management and assisted in the establishment and administration of other awards. Kaoru Ishikawa lived through an interesting period in Japan’s history. He was born in Tokyo in 1915 (Vector, 2012). He obtained a Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from Tokyo University in 1939 (Vector, 2012). After graduating from college, he spent roughly two years in the Japanese Military where he served as Naval Technical Officer. With this position he had the task of building a factory with around 600 workers under him (Process improvement, n.d.). After his time in the military, he spent the years from 1941 to 1947 working for the private firm of Nissan Liquid Fuel Company (Vector, 2012). In 1947, he became an associate professor for the University of Tokyo where he researched statistical methods for managing quality control (Process improvement, n.d.). In 1960, he obtained a Doctorate in Engineering from the University of Tokyo (Towers, n.d.). Throughout his career, he served as a member on multiple quality control organizations providing his expertise into their causes. He also spent much of his career sharing his expertise to large companies across the globe who hired him to teach seminars on quality control (Process improvement, n.d.). Kaoru Ishikawa worked alongside many other professionals in the Quality Control Profession. He worked with Deming and shared many of the same thoughts on quality control. He used some of Deming’s ideas and built upon them to create his own set of principles. They are identified as six categories.
1.) Determine goals and targets.
2.) Determine methods of reaching goals.
3.) Engage in education and training.
4.) Implement work.
5.) Check the effects of implementation.
6.) Take appropriate action.
(Skymark, n.d.) Kaoru Ishikawa had great ideas and developed tools to be used for better quality management. He believed in the idea of quality circles meaning that all levels of employees from production level employees to top management needed to be involved in the quality improvement process (About, n.d.). He also believed that an organization’s top management had to be in support of quality improvement initiatives or they would be doomed to fail (Skymark, n.d.). This can be seen in just about all industries, if top management in any organization is not on-board with something chances are that it will not succeed. He believed that customer satisfaction was the determining factor of quality being reached. He created what is known as the “Cause and Effect Diagram” (also known as the fishbone or Ishikawa diagrams). This diagram allowed users to see the result and to see all possible points that created the result. The idea of seeing these causes was that the root cause could be found and not just symptoms (Skymark, n.d.). He also used tools created by other people but truly provided value to their use within the quality control process. Among these tools were control charts, run charts, histograms, scatter diagrams, Pareto charts, and flowcharts (Skymark, n.d.) Ishikawa’s expertise was
