THE BOOK THAT REVOLUTIONIZED QUALITY MANAGEMENT
"Until the 1980's the role of quality was grossly underestimated--and now it is grossly exaggerated. Drawing on a wealth of experience, logical analysis and systematic thinking, Optimizing Quality in Electronics Assembly is the first book to put quality in its proper place. Moreover, the authors teach how to gain much better bottom-line results without paying needless lip service to the conventional wisdoms of quality."-- Eluyahu M. Goldratt, Founder of Theory of Constraints
"Every field has its forward thinking leaders. In quality management, the new leaders are Smith and Whitehall. Optimizing Quality in electronics Assembly guides us into the 21st century with creative force and proven practicality based upon scientific education. Much as Buckminster Fuller revolutionized architecture by designing more with less, Smith and Whitehall eliminate the waste in electronics assembly. Their principles offer exhilarating opportunities for every open-minded electronics assembly professional."--Maynard Eaves, Non-Conforming Product Manager, Hewlett-Packard Co.,Integrated Circuits Business Division.
"There is no substitute for the understanding gained from application and liverally dispensed here. This book will helo many quality professionals find their path and it should become required reading for the associated disciplines of Desing and Manufacturing. A thoughtful and provoking treatise, educational, solution-oriented and very readable, this is a book I know I will use again and again."-- Prof. John Roulston, Technical Director, GEC-Marconi Avionics
In 1996, Jim Smith and Frank Whitehall's radical textbook Optimizing Quality in Electronics Assembly: A Heretical Approach revolutionized the meaning of quality management in electronics manufacturing. Quality professionals who have never heard of Smith and Whitehall follow their guidelines every day.
Jim, a founder and Managing Director of Electronics Manufacturing Sciences, has long been widely known as one of North America's leading authorities on electronics process management. Frank, retired Director of Corporate Quality at Ferranti Defence Systems in Edinburgh, Scotland, is a noted reliability and airworthiness consultant. Between them, they possess almost nine decades of hands–on experience shaping industry standards and procedures, untold thousands of lecture hours, and hundreds of publications.
However, despite their deep knowledge of electronics manufacturing and quality assurance, Jim and Frank were unprepared for the amount of misinformation that came to light during their research. In Jim's words, “During research and refresher readings, we began to notice disturbing patterns in prominent contemporary quality literature. The literature regularly cited earlier works in ways that made us wonder how many of the modern authorities had actually read the referenced material. Ultimately, those concerns about possible revisionism caused us to reread the original works — many of which have been out of print for half a century or more. The amount of misquotation and misinterpretation is staggering.
“Discovering the historical inaccuracies in so many influential quality writings then required intensive reappraisal of popular modern quality attitudes. The results were vastly more intriguing, consequential, and — at times — disturbing than we had imagined at the start of the project. When we first sat down at the word processor, our views about quality were not profoundly atypical of most contemporary quality professionals. Our findings and experiences shook us out of that complacency. Certainly, we will never again regard the meaning, significance, and methods of achieving quality as we did when we began this project. We suspect that readers may find themselves thinking of quality in quite different ways as well.”
The book challenged much of the era's conventional wisdom about quality beginning with the definition of quality. The American Society for Quality Control (which changed its name to ASQ — American Society for Quality — after Smith and Whitehall pointed out that "quality control" represented a discredited approach to quality) believed that “Quality is what the consumer says it is. It’s not what the quality professional says it is. It’s not what the engineer says it is. It’s what the customer says it is.” But Smith and Whitehall demonstrated that a business cannot run on such a subjective basis. Quality (the product or service does what the supplier claims it will do for a length of time and in an operating environment also specified by the supplier) is not the same as value (the stream of benefits relative to price). Most shocking, Smith and Whitehall introduced the concept of "pseudo–quality" (activities that do not enhance reliability or reduce cost).
Today, thousands of copies are in use throughout the world. No one can read Optimizing Quality in Electronics Assembly without dramatically altering their views about the meaning, value, and methods of managing quality.
