Armand V. Feigenbaum

Armand Vallin Feigenbaum (April 6, 1920 He devised the concept of Total Quality Control (TQM), now known as "total quality management". received a bachelor's degree in industrial administration from Union College, and worked during World War II on aircraft engine design. He worked closely with his brother, Donald S. Feigenbaum.

He died on November 13, 2014, at the age of 94.

Key ideas Val Feigenbaum's significant contributions to the development of quality in business management were to link established ideas about quality into a more systematic discipline and to define total quality in a workable and practical way. Accountability for quality: because quality is everybody's job, it may become nobody's job. Central to this idea is that quality must be actively managed and have visibility at the highest levels of management. The concept of quality cost: the cost of achieving quality plus the cost of absence of quality. The time lag between the introduction of total quality initiatives inside the major companies within a country and their observed economic impact: for example, Japanese companies introduced quality initiatives in the 1950s which took effect in the Japanese economy in the 1970s and likewise the United States' quality initiatives from the 1980's saw an economic impact in the 1990s. Quality is neither a department, nor a technique nor a philosophy. It is a fundamental way of managing.