Phil Crosby's Message

Crosby's name is best known in relations to the concepts of Do It Right First time and Zero Defects. He considers traditional quality control, acceptable quality limits and waivers of sub-standard products to represent failure rather than assurance of success. Crosby therefore defines quality as conformance to the requirements which the company itself has established for its products based directly on its customers' needs. He believes that since most companies have organisations and systems that allow deviation from what is really required, manufacturing companies spend around 20% of their revenues doing things wrong and doing them over again. According to Crosby this can be 35% of operating expenses for service companies.
He does not believe that workers should take prime responsibility for poor quality; the reality, he says, is that you have to get management straight. In the Crosby scheme of things, management sets the tone on quality and workers follow their example; whilst employees are involved in operational difficulties and draw them to management's attention, the initiative comes from the top. Zero defects means that the company's objective is 'doing things right first time'. This will not prevent people from making mistakes, but will encourage everyone to improve continuously.

http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~samho/tqm/tqmex/crosby.htm

Phil Crosby's Essays

Philip B. Crosby (1926-2001) was a local businessman, author, teacher, and generous contributor to our local community. Known as the "Father of the Quality Revolution", his philosophies and concepts helped change the way business is conducted worldwide.
On this site his various articles, essays, and other writings will be available for all to read. The first article presented will be his essay The Changing of Quality in America. The Library is also scanning essays that were written by Mr. Crosby for his 14 Step Quality Improvement Process. This is an on going project and the essays will be added as they are scanned.
The articles, essays and writings on this page are available for download in PDF format. If you do not have a PDF viewer, you can obtain a free copy of Adobe Acrobat at www.adobe.com.

http://www.wppl.org/wphistory/PhilipCrosby/grant.htm

Phil Crosby Collection

Philip Bayard Crosby was born June 18, 1926 in Wheeling, West Virginia. His parents were Mary and Dr. Edward K. Crosby. His father was a Podiatrist. He had one brother, David. He attended public schools in Wheeling, graduating from Triadelphia High School in 1944. He joined the Navy and became a hospital corpsman.
In the fall of 1946 Mr. Crosby entered the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine in Cleveland. After graduation he returned to Wheeling and practiced podiatry with his father. He soon discovered this was not his field.
He was recalled to military service during the Korean conflict, this time he served as a Marine Medical Corpsman.
In 1952 Mr. Crosby went to work for the Crosley Corporation, (Richmond, Indiana) as a junior electronic test technician. He was asked to join the American Society for Quality Control, the Richmond section, and this is where his early concepts concerning "quality" began to form.

http://www.wppl.org/wphistory/PhilipCrosby/index.html

Phil Crosby Quotes

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/phil_crosby.html

Philip Crosby- The Fun Uncle of the Quality Revolution

Dr. Deming and Dr. Juran were the great brains of the quality revolution. Where Phil Crosby excelled was in finding a terminology for quality that mere mortals could understand. His books, "Quality Without Tears" and "Quality is Free" were easy to read, so people read them. He popularized the idea of the "cost of poor quality", that is, figuring out how much it really costs to do things badly.Like Frederick Taylor, Philip Crosby's ideas came from his experience on an assembly line. He focused on zero defects, not unlike the focus of the modern Six Sigma Quality movement. Mr. Crosby was quick to point out, however, that zero defects is not something that originates on the assembly line. To create a manufacturing process that has zero defects management must set the tone and atmosphere for employees to follow. If management does not create a system by which zero defects are clearly the objective then employees are not to blame when things go astray and defects occur. The benefit for companies of such a system is a dramatic decrease in wasted resources and time spent producing goods that consumer's do not want.Mr. Crosby defined quality as a conformity to certain specifications set forth by management and not some vague concept of "goodness." These specifications are not arbitrary either; they must be set according to customer needs and wants.

http://www.skymark.com/resources/leaders/crosby.asp

Phil Crosbt- Zero Defects

Zero Defects" is Step 7 of "Philip Crosby's 14 Step Quality Improvement Process" [1]. Although applicable to any type of enterprise, it has been primarily adopted within industry supply chains wherever large volumes of components are being purchased (common items such as nuts and bolts are good examples).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Defects

Phil Crosby

Philip Bayard "Phil" Crosby, (June 18, 1926–August 18, 2001) was a businessman and author who contributed to management theory and quality management practices.

Crosby initiated the Zero Defects program at the Martin Company Orlando, Florida plant [1]. As the quality control manager of the Pershing missile program, Crosby was credited with a 25 percent reduction in the overall rejection rate and a 30 percent reduction in scrap costs.
In 1979 after a career at ITT, Crosby started the management consulting company Philip Crosby Association, Inc [[1]]. This consulting group provided educational courses in quality management both at their headquarters in Winter Park, Florida and at eight foreign locations. Also in this year Crosby published his first business book, Quality Is Free. This book would become popular at the time because of the crisis in North American quality. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s North American manufacturers were losing to market share to Japanese products largely due to the superiority of quality of the Japanese products.

Crosby's response to the quality crisis was the principle of "doing it right the first time" (DIRFT). He would also include four major principles:
the definition of quality is conformance to requirements
the system of quality is prevention
the performance standard is zero defects
the measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance
Crosby's prescription for quality improvement was a 14 step program. His belief was that a company that established a quality program will see savings more than pay off the cost of the quality program ("quality is free").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Crosby