Comments and Endorsements

This landmark book has shown how quality is a way of managing an organization and how customer satisfaction, lower costs, and human resource effectiveness are all largely dependent on total quality control. In introducing such terms as total quality management and company wide quality, the book brought the focus to why an organization wide quality program, connected to both customers and suppliers, is essential. Yet, never have Feigenbaum’s tenets been of greater significance than in today’s international economic environment.

Like finance and marketing, total quality has become a fundamental element of modern business strategy. Many CEO’s recognize it’s the key to operating a business for improvements from increasing market share to eliminating the hidden plant whose waste drains profitability. What’s more, the customer is more discriminating and quality-conscious than ever before and with the advent of the global marketplace, the concepts and practices set forth in this book are sure to take on even more importance in the years to come.

This special revision of the Third Edition, published to mark the book’s Fortieth Anniversary, spotlights the new challenges and opportunities afforded by quality programs in today’s rapidly changing business climate. Major additions include a new discussion of quality’s relationship to corporate profitability, ten benchmarks for effective quality of both products and services and four management principles for making quality a company’s best investment in competitiveness.

• Total quality management for customer satisfaction leadership—and the business strategy and organization for making this happen.
• Profiles of the buyer, the producer, and the national and international marketplace in today’s new era of quality.
• The total quality techniques and applications that are essential to product development success and to purchased material improvement.
• Creating the company environment and the employee empowerment required for quality leadership.
• The technical and statistical methodologies for quality and the process control and quality equipment engineering techniques to use them effectively.
• Measuring and managing quality costs as a key to profitability and high return on investment.
• Managing quality as the most cost-effective, least capital-intensive route to productivity.

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