Certification in Business
Senior 3 · Entrepreneurship
Certification in Business
Lesson 2 of 4
23 min
A blacksmith in the past made each hoe from start to finish and checked it himself; his name and his customers’ trust depended on it. When factories began to make thousands of identical goods, no single worker saw the whole product, so factories hired inspectors to check finished goods. Over the twentieth century, managers learned that inspecting at the end is slow and wasteful, and that quality has to be built into the process and the whole organisation. This lesson follows that story.
Definition
Inspection: examining finished products to separate good ones from bad ones.
Statistical quality control: using samples and statistics, such as control charts, to tell whether a process is working normally or something has gone wrong.
Control chart: a graph of measurements taken from a process over time, with limits; points outside the limits show that the process needs attention.
Continual improvement: making products and processes a little better again and again, rather than once.
| Period | What changed |
|---|---|
| Craft era | skilled workers made whole products and checked their own work; guilds set rules for their trades |
| Industrial era (1800s) | mass production in factories; separate inspectors checked finished goods |
| 16 May 1924 | Walter Shewhart, working for a telephone equipment maker in the United States, proposed the control chart, the start of statistical quality control |
| 23 February 1947 | the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) began work, to agree international standards |
| 1950 | W. Edwards Deming lectured Japanese managers and engineers on statistical quality control; Japan created the Deming Prize in 1951 |
| 1980s | facing competition from high-quality Japanese goods, firms in North America and Europe adopted total quality management |
| March 1987 | ISO published the ISO 9000 series of quality management standards; ISO 9001, the standard against which systems are certified, has been revised several times since |
| Rwanda | Law N° 50 of 2013 established the Rwanda Standards Board (RSB), which develops standards and certifies products, systems and persons |
Shewhart’s and Deming’s idea of continual improvement is often drawn as a cycle. ISO 9001 is built around the same cycle.
Tip
Memory hook: the story in three words, Inspect → Control → Manage. First, inspectors checked products; then statistics controlled processes; now whole systems manage quality. Exam questions on the “background of quality management” want this sequence, with two or three dated milestones.
Worked example
Worked example 1: reading a simple control chart (illustrative figures)
A water bottler fills bottles to 500 ml. Its limits are 495 ml to 505 ml. The average of a sample taken each hour is: 501, 499, 502, 498, 507, 500 ml.
Check each point: all are between 495 and 505 except the fifth, 507 ml.
Act: at the fifth hour the filling machine was overfilling, so the operator should stop, find the cause (perhaps a loose valve), fix it and record what happened. Without the chart, the problem might only have been noticed by customers, or as lost profit from giving away water.
Worked example
Worked example 2: one turn of the cycle (illustrative figures)
A bakery receives 40 complaints a month about burnt loaves.
| Step | What the bakery does |
|---|---|
| Plan | finds that the oven is hotter at the back; plans to turn the trays halfway through baking |
| Do | tries it for two weeks on one oven |
| Check | complaints from that oven fall from 20 to 4 a month |
| Act | makes turning the trays the rule for all ovens; plans the next improvement |
Size of the improvement on the test oven: fewer complaints.
Warning
Common mistakes. (1) Thinking quality management began with ISO 9001: it grew over a century, from inspection to statistical control to whole systems. (2) Confusing ISO, the organisation founded in 1947, with ISO 9001, one of its standards. (3) Treating the PDCA cycle as a one-off: its point is that it repeats.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the timeline, the PDCA diagram, the tables, the worked examples and the practice items. The bottler and bakery are illustrative (2026).
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
