Re: [req] Quality Control Circle
A brief from Wikipedia: A Quality Circle is a volunteer group composed of workers, or even a group of students nowadays, who meet together to discuss workplace improvement, and make presentations to management with their ideas, especially relating to quality of output. Typical topics are improving safety, improving product design, and improvement in manufacturing process. This can not only improve the performance of any organisation, but also motivate and enrich the work life of employees. The ideal size of a quality circle is from 8 to 10 members.
Quality circles have the advantage of continuity, the circle remains intact from project to project. (For a comparison to Quality Improvement Teams see Juran's Quality by Design.
Quality Circles were started in Japan in 1962 (Kaoru Ishikawa has been credited for creating Quality Circles) as another method of improving quality. The movement in Japan was coordinated by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE). Prof. Ishikawa, who believed in tapping the creative potential of workers, innovated the Quality Circle movement to give Japanese industry that extra creative edge.
The use of Quality Circles has spread beyond Japan, in particular to Scandinavian countries. Quality circles are implemented even in educational sectors in India and QCFI (Quality Circle Forum of India) is promoting such activities.
There are different quality circle tools, namely:
* The Ishikawa diagram - which shows hierarchies of causes contributing to a problem
* The Pareto Chart - which analyses different causes by frequency to illustrate the vital cause
* The PDCA-Deming wheel - Plan, Do, Check, Act, as described by W. Edwards Deming