by Spencer Graves and Ron Kenett

The modern quality movement is now truly international. It was born in the US with Walter Shewhart in the 1920s and 1930s. In spread to Japan in the 1950s and returned to the US, improved, in the 1980s. In the meantime, it had also spread to other parts of Asia. Since 1980, it has spread to Europe (East and West), to Latin America, Israel, India and elsewhere. Each nation has its own quality traditions with some practices developed locally and others copied from elsewhere(1). No matter how much we already know, there is more we can learn by sharing experiences and ideas around the world.

An important contributor to economic development – improving the quality of life for all – is the diffusion of information about what other people are doing that is new and better. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Americans were known as great copiers. The European ancestors of many of us copied steam, railroads, textile, and mining and chemical technologies from Great Britain; photography and gunpowder from France; iron manufacturing from England, Germany and France; pharmaceuticals from Switzerland, France and England; and glass making and water turbines from several European nations; with many contributions from other places(2). These ancestors improved much of what they copied, and by the 1850s the British and others were sending visitors to the US to learn from us(3). After World War II, many Japanese visited the US to see what they could copy from the nation whose military had defeated theirs. By the 1980s, the US had a huge negative balance of trade with Japan, which inspired many people to study Japanese quality and productivity.

None of us can visit all the places inside and outside the US that might have something worth studying. To help our readers benefit from the experience of others outside the US, Quality Progress is inaugurating a new "World View" feature. This feature is designed to help you (a) learn from successful improvement efforts elsewhere and (b) work better with potential partners and suppliers in other countries.

A "World View" of quality is important to anyone who works in an organization that has a major partner or supplier in another country; if this does not include you today, it may tomorrow. If you have a quality problem with a supplier in Puebla, Mexico, for example, you might find it easier to get the attention of the Mexican executives if you could provide them with a Spanish-language description of successful improvements achieved by some of their competitors a few kilometers away. You might refer them, for example, to quality improvement training provided in Spanish by Monterrey Tech in various parts of Latin America. (The World Wide Web site for Monterrey Tech is http://www-cib.mty.itesm.mx.)

If you are subcontracting software development to a company in India, for example, and you have some concerns about the quality of their work, it might help bridge the culture gap to review the proceedings of an international software quality conference held in New Delhi in 1994(4).

In the past, the need for a "world view" on any technical subject was reflected in foreign language requirements for a Ph.D.; these requirements were important because prior to World War II, some of the best research literature in almost any subject was not available in English. This is less true today, though there is still often a delay of years between the publication of the best Japanese-language research reports on quality, for example, and their appearance in English. There are still many good reports that are not translated, which means that people who can't access the non-English language literature must do without the benefit of those ideas. Through this feature of Quality Progress, we plan to bring you several reports each year of activities outside the US that can help people further improve quality and productivity. If you have a story to tell that gives a "World View" on quality and productivity improvement, we invite you to send us a brief description. Articles for this feature will be only two pages long (four pages double spaced) and will inform Quality Progress readers about important events for quality and productivity improvement internationally or will describe examples of improvement efforts outside the US that can help people everywhere in their improvement efforts.

To make contributing easier for potential authors who think and write more easily in a language different from English, we are developing a system to permit an initial review of articles in major international languages other than English. If we have a reviewer who can read that language, it will be sent to that person. If that reviewer thinks the article might be suitable, the author will be asked to submit an English translation, which will then go to a second reviewer. Currently, we can consider drafts in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Hebrew in addition to English; we hope to add other languages in the future.

If you know about an event or an improvement experience outside the US that might be of interest to the readers of Quality Progress, we'd like to hear about it. Please send your manuscripts or questions to Sue Daniels, ASQ, 611 E. Wisconsin Ave., PO Box 3005, Milwaukee, WI 53201-3005, USA, or e-mail to sdaniels@asqc.org.

(1) Joseph M. Juran (ed.), A History of Managing for Quality (Milwaukee, WI: American Society for Quality, 1995)

(2) Darwin H. Stapleton, The Transfer of Early Industrial Technologies to America (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1987).

(3) David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production: 1800-1932 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins U. Press, 1984).

(4) First International Conference on Software Testing, Reliability, and Quality Assurance (Piscataway, NY: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1994).