William Edwards Deming
Although poor in natural resources, Japan is nowadays recognized as industrial and economical giant, with extremely high productivity, unexcelled quality of products and very high Human Development Index. However, getting into reading material (with primary task to correct spelling) I found out it wasn’t always that way. In 1950s their products were synonym for bad quality with the lowest price on the market, even called pejoratively “japonesia”
For various geopolitical reasons that were prevalent in the time after II WW (SSSR vs USA), USA wanted to strengthen its influence in the defeated Japan. Various kinds of incentives and help followed, which included hiring experts and consultants with intention to give the benefit of experiences from American companies and to show how is job done there. One of the consultants was Edward Deming, who came with intention to implement Quality Control System in Japanese companies.
Through series of seminars and lectures Deming conveyed his former experience and techniques of improvement and solving problems related to quality. Those techniques included Statistical Quality Control and Statistical Process Control, methodologies that were recognized and efficient in USA.
Deming’s idea was to pass on new business principle and to convince both management in companies and engineers that consumer is main in production chain and that all employees are responsible for final quality of the product. He emphasized that is essential to define needs and desires of consumers. He also pointed out that creation of a quality product demands involvement of teams composed of all company structures – management, marketing, sales, R&D, engineering, design, production, supplies etc.
First lectures took place in 1950 with 400 participants included. At that point he already emphasized that through adoption of adequate standards, proper use of quality control and process control bad reputation of Japanese products could be altered within 5 years. Objective was to create product of high quality and low price which would domineer on the world market.
How wide those courses were recognized and how much attention had been given to them tells us the fact that in next 20 years more than 14000 participants took part in it.
Great number of Japanese manufacturers incorporated Deming’s techniques and in that way elevated their productivity and quality of their products to tremendous heights. Improved quality combined with low costs generated new international demand for Japanese products.
Sony, Toyota, Nissan, Toshiba, Honda, Panasonic, Canon, Fujitsu.
Initial goal of SQC developed in the 30s in USA was to follow production through different stages of procession, to detect and solve problems, and to follow quality of final product/service. Deming improved this method and pointed out that quality comes from process improvement, not from just scanning and analyzing results of bad production.
What often prevails is opinion (wrong opinion) that the one working hard can get anything well done. However, if processes are wrong they cannot produce quality, despite of amount of work invested –Deming.
Over a period of many years working in Japan, Deming modified SPC/SQC processes in the cycle nowadays known as PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act).