The ABC of Qualimetry
The Toolkit for Measuring Immeasurable
Garry G. Azgaldov
Alexander V. Kostin
Alvaro E. Padilla Omiste
© Garry G. Azgaldov, 2016
© Alexander V. Kostin, 2016
© Alvaro E. Padilla Omiste, 2016
© Eric Azgaldov, translation, 2016
Created with intellectual publishing system Ridero
About the authors
Professor Garry G. Azgaldov, a pioneer of Qualimetry, is a Doctor of Economics and a fellow of the International Academy of Informatisation, the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, the Academy of Economic Sciences and Business, the Futures Research Academy, the Academy of Quality Problems and the International Guild of Quality Professionals. He is a chief researcher at the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
Contact phone: +7(495)6143024; e-mail: gazgaldov@mail.ru
Alexander V. Kostin is a PhD in Economics, a certified appraiser of intellectual property, a corresponding member of the Academy of Quality Problems. He is a senior researcher at the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; the Creator of the on-line library QUALIMETRY.RU.
Contact phone: +7(916)1058104; е-mail kostin.alexander@gmail.com
Professor Alvaro E. Padilla Omiste is a Doctor of Education, a Biochemist and a Bolivian Chemist. He is a Lecturer of Distance learning programs, Education Management and Education Research Methodology at several Bolivian and Latin American universities; Author and Co-author of several books and articles on issues related mainly to the R & D and innovation.
Contact phones: +591 44721878 (home); +591 70713681 (mobile); e-mail: apadilla@icloud.com
Introduction
Anything that people produce with in aperiod of time, as well as, anything they encounter in the course of commodity exchange and consumption and, generally in their everyday life, can be expressed by a set of four elements: products, services, information, and energy.1 Each of these elementscan be fully described by three fundamental variables:
– Quantity (in conventional units of measurement);
– Cost of production, distribution2 and consumption / utilisation / exploitation / application of a unit of quantity; and
– Quality of the unit of quantity.
The first of these, quantity, is basic to calculation in the engineering disciplines. The second, cost, is recognised and studied by the body of economic disciplines. As to the third characteristic, quality, until quite recently it was seldom if ever taken into account by either engineering or economic or management disciplines.
The reason was a lack of a theory and a toolbox for avalid quantification (assessment) of quality, such as the quality of products / services / information / energy. Without this kind of assessmentit is very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain an effective economic or social structure, e.g., an important omnibus structure called the quality of life, otherwise known as the standard of living.
The foregoing applies, among other things, to management, political, legislative or analytical activities.
For at least one time, almost every manager (as well as a policy-maker, law-maker or analyst3) has faced the problem of quantitative evaluation of quality, e.g., the need for quality control; depending on the specifics of their work it may be the quality control of an industrial or a social process (including the control of life quality), a design, a product, personnel, etc.
In every such situation what the manager has to do is to convert the quality of a controlled object —a production or social process, a design, a product, personnel, etc. – within a given time from a given state, A, to a target state, B. Clearly, the manager cannot solve this problem unless he/she is capable of quantifying A and B, that is, assessing the object’s quality in quantitative terms.
Hereinafter in this ABC we will often discuss quality with special reference to the quality of life as the most important, succinct and general description of socio-economic processes. The quality of other objects, e.g., products, will be used to make our examples more graphic.
Secondly, quality must be quantified in those frequent situations where a manager must decide between two or more options. For example, with superior quality in mind a manager has to decide:
– Whether a consumer product is to be imported or to be manufactured at home;
– On an organisation/administrative structure best suited for controlling a social or manufacturing process; or
– An equipment package for building infrastructure facilities in an urban setting.
When the number of options is greater than two, given that the quality of each option is determined by a combination of parameters (more about it later), the inescapable conclusion is that if one is to address this class of problem one must be able to quantify quality.
Lastly, we need to quantify quality when dealing with economic and social problems where, if we are to improve calculation accuracy, we have to take into account qualitative as well as quantitative factors (that is to say, if the former cannot be expressed in currency units), such as social, environmental, ergonomic or aesthetic ones.
With these considerations in mind the reader is introduced to an ABC of qualimetry, a relatively new scientific discipline concerned with the methodology and total quantitative assessment of the quality of different objects and of some of their qualitative characteristics that do not lend themselves to measurement in common monetary units. The fact is that despite there being a sizeable body of writing (more than 100 books with the term qualimetry in their title) any information found there is usually outdated and often plain wrong, which may lead to wrong decision making processes.
Because of the limited size of this text we can only describe the basics of qualimetry in its most common version rather than cover this discipline in full. For this reason Chapter 1 will focus on the so-called short-cut method of qualimetry. Unlike other methods, the approximate and the exact ones, it takes far less time to learn, understand and apply; however, it will help you solve, with reasonable accuracy, quite a few problems encountered in practice4.
This ABC will be useful to specialists in the executive, regulatory and legislative branches, as well as, to all those interested in the methodology of decision-making pertaining to the quality of different kinds of objects.
The authors would appreciate any constructive comments on the subject matter of this book.
Chapter 1. Qualimetry in Outline
Over the years following the appearance of qualimetry, many new scientific related with this science resulted, but most of them are scattered over various small editions and remain virtually inaccessible to the broad reading public interested in quality assessment issues. The purpose of this section then is to give a systematic and fairly complete picture of the state of the art in the theory and practice of evaluation of the quality of various objects of a social or economic character.
1.1. General Information about Quality and Quality Control
1.1.1. The Essence of Quality and Quality Control
The Concept of Quality and What Makes It Different from Other Similar Concepts
As already noted in the Introduction, Quality Control is one of the main applications for qualimetry.
Unfortunately, modern economic theory and economic practice alike, has unambiguous and common interpretations of the terms quality and control, leading to frequent misunderstandings with resulting in completely different approaches to many important issues. For example, “What really happens to an object (e.g., life quality), which, as often claimed, is being controlled?” Is the process indeed a control one? Is it indeed quality and not something else that is subject to control?”
These are not idle questions. Unless we figure them out we cannot count on success in addressing the issue of quality. Therefore, let us clarify our definitions of the key terms, quality and control. At the outset we introduce some terms based on which it will be possible to define the desired term, quality control.
Object, a thing or a process; as applied to the theme of these introduction:
– An animate thing (e.g., a city dweller) or an inanimate one (e.g., a motor car);
– A product of labour (e.g., a dwelling house) or a product of nature (e.g., a natural landscape around an urban settlement);
– A physical object (e.g., an industrial enterprises) or an ideal one (e.g., an artwork made out in a book title);
– A natural object (e.g., a landscape) or a man-made one (e.g., a set of landscape design structures);
– A product (e.g., a piece of clothing) or a service (e.g., a medical service);
– Items (e.g., motorways) or processes (e.g., life activities, which collectively form the quality of life).
In what follows the term object will apply to an object (which can be called “singular”) such that its quantity, in common measurement units, equals one. Then, a city can be an object but not three cities taken together; likewise one airplane, one specialist, etc.
Property. A feature, characteristic or peculiarity of an object, that becomes apparent during its consumption/operation/use/application (henceforth, all these terms are used interchangeably) according to the purpose of its use (e.g., the mean lifetime of a community).
The mention of the condition “according to its purpose” is caused by the following considerations: Imagine an emergency situation in which indoor sports facilities have to be used as temporary shelter for the inhabitants of a city whose homes were destroyed in a disaster (such as caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005). The floor area of the interior, which can accommodate refugees, would seem to be a characteristic of a sports structure. The thing is that this kind of utilisation of athletic facilities is abnormal, out of keeping with their purpose. Therefore, a feature of a sport hall such as “the number of refugees it can accommodate” cannot be regarded as its “property” in a qualimetric sense.
We draw the reader’s attention to one more circumstance, which, although mentioned in the definition of the term property, is sometimes neglected in practice. Properties are not just any features/characteristics/peculiarities of an object, but only those that occur during its production or consumption/application/use/operation.
For illustration we give the following example (which for greater clarity relates to product quality). Any product made of a ferromagnetic material is known to possess the quality of magnetostriction, that is, the ability to change its shape and size in response to changes in the magnetic field.
Let us consider two different kinds of products made of a ferromagnetic material: a mechanical chronometer watch and the track shoes of a caterpillar tractor. Obviously, magnetostriction is incident to both.
In a chronometer magnetostriction shows in the way its accuracy is affected by exposure to a strong magnetic field. As for tracks, the phenomenon of magnetostriction in a physical sense does take place during their operation, but its impact (e.g., the magnitude of the absolute and relative changes in the linear and volumetric dimensions of the tracks) does not affect the performance of the tracks as part of a caterpillar belt. We can assume, therefore, that magnetostriction is not manifested in the consumption of these products (that is not in a physical but an economic sense.)
It follows that for an object like a chronometer watch, the presence of magnetostriction is to be considered one of its properties, whereas for a caterpillar track it is not a property in the sense outlined above in the definition of property.
Quality is a property representing a set of those and only those properties that characterise the consumption results of an object, both desirable and undesirable, excluding the cost of their creation and consumption. That is to say, this set includes only properties associated with the results achieved in consuming an object, and does not include ones associated with the cost of providing these results.
Notice that:
(1) The properties that constitute quality do not include those that manifest themselves in the course of production/creation/development/manufacture of objects (hereinafter, unless otherwise indicated we shall generally use instead of four terms – production, creation, development, manufacture – a single umbrella term, production);and
(2) The entire life cycle of an object will be conventionally considered to consist of only two broad stages, those of production and consumption, with the consumption stage including what is known as distribution (which is only applicable to some objects, e.g., products of labour but not the quality of life).
Thus, when we analyse the quality of an object we can – even must – ignore its manufacturing technique and its production and consumption costs and focus instead on the results, both positive and negative, achieved at its consumption stage.
Cost Effectiveness. The totality of properties characterising the capital input into the production and consumption of an object. (In some cases cumulative costs can be represented by so-called reduced costs or full costs.).
From the definitions and interpretations of the terms quality and cost-effectiveness it follows that the entire set of properties of an object can be divided into two disjoint subsets: the properties that form the quality of the object and those that form its cost effectiveness.
As consumers are not normally only care for either the quality of an object ignoring its cost effectiveness or, alternatively, its cost effectiveness without regard to its quality, the science of qualimetry, naturally, felt the need for a characteristic that would take into account the entire set of properties associated both with the consumption of an object (its quality) and the costs incurred (its cost effectiveness).
This characteristic is termed integral quality in qualimetry.
Integral quality. The property of an object describing the sum of its quality and cost effectiveness. Thus, integral quality is the most general characteristic of an object, which factors in all of its properties.
It should be noted that the engineering and economic literature uses concepts and terms similar in meaning to the ones introduced above, quality and integral quality. We will consider these concepts starting with those who are close to the concept of quality.
The term engineering level is usually applied to the quality of products (but not, e.g., to the quality of life). It is almost identical in scope to the term quality. However, it has several shortcomings compared to the latter:
(a) In a purely linguistic sense, with some objects this term is perceived as much less suitable than quality. Imagine pronouncing phrases like “the engineering level of ladies” perfume”, “the engineering level of milk,” “the engineering level of a specialist,” “the engineering level of a managerial decision,” or “the engineering level of life.” Substituting quality for engineering level immediately improves the sound of these identical terms: “the quality of ladies” perfume,” “the quality of milk,” “the quality of a specialist,”“the quality of a managerial decision,” “the quality of life.”