Armand V. Feigenbaum – Life and Contributions

Armand Feigenbaum was born in 1922. Feigenbaum was the first to define a systems engineering approach to quality. Feigenbaum’s concept of total quality control, known today as total quality management (TQM), combines management methods and economic theory with organizational principles. Feigenbaum’s career initiated his significant contributions to total quality management. He began his career with General Electric (GE) in 1937 as an apprentice toolmaker and management intern with the turbine, engine and transformer group. He entered Union College in Schenectady, NY, in 1938 to study engineering while continuing his work at GE. His coursework focused on mathematics, statistics, …show more content…

In the Harvard Business Review, Feigenbaum identified three important customer trends:
• Customers, both industry and consumer, have been increasing their quality requirements sharply in recent years. This event is greatly correlated with intense competition.
• As a result, there is an increased customer demand for higher quality products.
• Quality costs have become high. For many companies the quality costs may be too high to maintain and improve their competitive position (Kubiak).
These trends are especially important, because over the recent years there has been a greater demand for good quality products. Therefore, companies have instituted total quality management and Six Sigma to help ensure and emphasize quality throughout their organizations.
Founding a concept and a new thinking as total quality management was something so different than meeting in a hall and creating a republic, as it happened in Philadelphia. The founders of Total Quality Management is the result of a group of contemporary people whose thinking and interests, management literature and quality vision concluded in a revolution in the quality sector of industry and led to the apparition of Total Quality Management. The most amount of credit for “sounding the wake-up call on quality systems” it is to be assigned to a relative small group of innovators that later became known as “Gurus” of the subject. The group