How QC Circle born

Dr. K. Ishikawa of Japan felt that education is not only the need of the management but also to the workers. The fact that they are workers & shows that they are less educated. Such an education will help to bring selfdevelopment in them. A developed person understands his improvement could not be effective by merely giving education to top managers and engineers. They needed the full co-operation of the line workers who actually make the products. This meant enabling workers to understand their responsibilities, carry out their function as expected and to take care small work related problems. This practical and more useful to them. Dr. Ishikawa felt that elementary statistical system or techniques are more important and useful to the workers. His initial attempt to make them take up such education on their own did not succeed. Then he came out with the idea of asking the foremen who were knowledgeable on the elementary statistical system to teach the workers under them for one hour every week. He called this initially foreman workshop study group. But the group found the need of practical education to understand the tools. Since the group consisted of people from same work area they identified and selected a work related problem for their study. This education besides knowledge input to them also resulted in finding a solution to the problem. The practical benefit achieved created an interest in the workers and there was all around progress. Seeing the spurt of interest amongst the workers Dr. Ishikawa took up this method as an approach for educating workers. Thus began the education of workers and over seven million are reported to have been trained. The training feature intra departmental groups of ten or so workers seated around a table and hence later on in his article named it as QUALITY CONTROL CIRCLE (QCC). The learning is carried out by identifying the persistent problem in their area., selecting one of them and finding solution to them using elementary statistical systems. In this way, the training programmes provided the QC circle member with a new and exiting set of experiences i.e. separating a problem into its vital few and trivial many elements, propounding, criticizing and defending theories of causes of defects, collecting and analyzing data to validate or invalidate competing theories, proposing remedies and testing their effectiveness, overcoming cultural resistance to change, preparing reports to management and publication. Within the cultural pattern of the Japanese industry the project work of the QC circles has proved to be self-sustaining.