uality, a word with scores of meaning to different people, originated with the history of mankind; our species, about 100,000 years old, evolved into a communal society only about 10,000 years ago with the receding of the Ice Age that had lasted for thousands of years. Until the end of the last Ice Age, we lived independently, worrying about our basic needs and ourselves only. Something however happened during those years of cold weather: man developed a sense of well being and how to improve it. Our basic needs around 10,000 years ago were simply to gather the food for winter, to have enough animal skin to cover ourselves and to assure the cave roof over our heads. Man lived a very simple life, there was no community or society to worry about laws and regulations. However, man began having larger families as weather improved (and that needs to be studied further why?) and found that he can no longer gather enough during the limited months of summer. Now came the intelligence of man handy; he figured that some guys hunting were pretty good, especially the younger ones, while the older men knew how to clean and preserve the hide better. And that created the first division of labor and laid the seeds of a community. It is interesting to note that the division of labor was based on the quality of workmanship.

 Now we move on to the twentieth century; up until the mid-thirties, manufacturers produced products based on their designs but did not test them after putting them together, they hoped it worked; often these did not. And that created the concept of quality control, to test what has been manufactured once the competition driven by the Age of Technology took roots. Today, we still use Quality Control as our basic tenet of quality measure though it has now become rather obsolete. The mid-fifties saw the rise of another concept—to assure that a product is properly manufactured and thereby reducing the chances of it being rejected by Quality Control—this was the beginning of the era of Quality Assurance. In the early 60s and until about the end of 80s, the world saw a the then tiny nation, Japan, rise to the height of economic prowess, due mainly to a rather unique system of management—Total Quality Management—that actually had roots in their centuries old culture—to get everyone involved, show respect to others and always follow authority. Naturally, when a system works, the whole world becomes involved with it and the Americans were not far behind—they analyzed the system, performed surgery on it and beat it to death in understanding what works for Japan. A country, whose products were synonymous with cheap variety suddenly, became the icon of the highest quality. What total quality concept tells us is that it is no longer possible to produce quality products without getting the whole system involved, from the purchasing to shipping. Several international measure of total quality were devised and the most significant of these was the ISO9000 system that measures how well we know what we have to do, how well we have written procedures to do it and how well we are following it.