This paper briefly introduces the three stages of quality management development and the characteristics of each stage.

A: Before the early 1940s, quality management belonged to the traditional quality management stage, referred to as quality control. It is characterized by completely relying on inspection to eliminate waste products, relying on back testing to ensure quality, not following strict sampling inspection theory, but inspecting all products.

1924, W.A.Shewhat, a statistician of Bell Telephone Laboratory in the United States, first established the control theory of product inspection and put forward the so-called Shehart control chart. 1928, Dodge and Romig of Bell Telephone Laboratory founded the statistical sampling test theory. However, before the early 1940s, few enterprises used control charts and sampling inspection in quality management. It was not until World War II that the second stage of quality management, namely statistical quality control stage, was formed, which lasted until the end of 1950s. Control chart and sampling inspection are the remarkable characteristics of this stage.

In the early 1960s, the appearance of some large-scale equipment products with complex structures put forward higher requirements for quality management. To ensure the overall quality of these large-scale equipment products, it is impossible to rely on the integrity of a single component, but it requires the organic cooperation of multiple processes, personnel and departments, thus giving birth to total quality management. Total quality management is called TQC (Total Quality Control) for short, also called TQM (Total Quality Management). The period of this stage is from the early 1960s to the present.