Deming referred to the old African saying "it takes the whole village to raise a child".

Executive Summary

Deming referred to the old African saying "it takes the whole village to raise a child". In this paper we try to understand and interpret it through few core concepts of Quality and Total Quality Management introduced by quality gurus like Deming, Crosby, Juran and Gravin. This paper focuses on the quality journey of Eastman Chemical and presents an analysis of quality based strategies applied in Eastman chemical. This paper also evaluates the activities that indicate Eastman chemicals as a learning organization. The analysis indicated that Eastman Chemical thus entail high degree of TQM practices and is thus considered to be the best by its customers, employees and suppliers.

Introduction.

Quality assurance has been a significant aspect throughout history. Since the Egyptian era till date quality concepts paved the way for development of quality management to Total Quality management.

Thus it is important to understand what is Quality?

Quality is a wide concept and can be viewed from different perceptive or criteria.

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As cited in Forker, L., Gravin, D.A., (1993) classified different viewpoints into five quality approaches. These are summarized in Table-I

Approach

Definition variables

Underlying discipline

Transcendent

Product Based

User Based

Manufacturing Based

Value Based

Innate excellence

Quantity of desired attributes

Satisfaction of consumer preference

Conformance of requirement

Affordable excellence

Philosophy

Economics

Economic, marketing and operation management

Operation management

Operation management

Table- I

Approach to defining quality

Source: Gravin, D.A cited in Forker, L.B, (1996).

There has been a revolution with respect to quality planning and quality management particularly in business and industry in the last two decades. As Evans, J & Lindsay W., (1998) state that quality issues permeate all aspect of business enterprise, design, marketing, manufacturing, human resource management, supplier relation and financial management to name a few. How could quality be assured in performance...