Manufactured goods from Japan have an excellent reputation for quality and durability. That wasn’t always the case; immediately before and after World War II, good from Japan were regarded as shoddy. One big reason for the difference is a person: the American William Edwards Deming, who went by W. Edwards Deming. He was born October 14, 1900 in Iowa. He introduced the quality control and management practices used by major companies in Japan to become a major economic force. It was almost an accident.
Deming’s masters and doctorate degrees were in math and physics, and in the mid- to late-1940s he was working in the US Census Bureau. He was assigned to consult with the Japanese government about how to conduct a census, and while he was in Japan, some members of the US Radio Corps asked him to give a seminar on statistical quality control, particularly the work of Walter Shewart. At least one representative from the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers attended the seminar, and asked Deming if he would also present his ideas to business leaders in Japan. Not just his ideas about statistical quality control, though; his thoughts about management as well. He did, and ended up returning to Japan many times to consult about his ideas and methods.
His approach was tested in what’s now called the Ford-Mazda study. The two companies had a partnership to jointly manufacture automobile transmissions, among other things. In the US, Ford found that customers requested that their new cars have transmissions built in Japan, and they were willing to wait to get one. The transmissions were supposed to be the same; they had the same specifications. When US engineers compared them, though, they discovered that the Japanese products were made far more precisely, with much lower tolerances, than the US units. US parts were within the allowed tolerances, but Japanese parts were far better than that. The result was that the Japanese-made transmissions lasted longer and had fewer problems. Ford discovered that the differences stemmed from the very different ways the manufacturing systems in Japan were organized. They were using the same tools as the US plants, but the people did not act the same way.
An industrial production line, at least at the time, operated by moving the unit under work from one assembly station to the next. The transmissions were on a moving track. Under the US system, the track never stopped. Each worker had a specific role, which might be something like “fit a subassembly to the unit.” If something didn’t go together perfectly the first time, too bad; the line wasn’t stopping. The worker just assumed that “the quality guy” at the very end of the production line would spot any problems.
Under the system Deming had designed in Japan, though, each worker was empowered to stop the whole line if they encountered any problem. Then the workers in the area would come look at the issue, and were further empowered to fix problems they noticed. For example, one might observe that the subassembly was difficult to attach because it was very heavy. As a group, they would come up with a solution, which in that case might be anything from “have another worker help” to “add a bracket to hold the subassembly while it’s under work.” The quality inspection was constant instead of being left to the end.
In the US, an assembly line worker who stopped the line could expect to be punished, up to and including dismissal. In Japan, there was no such expectation. In fact, another of the pervasive ideas instilled by Deming was that workers’ individual output was not measured by managers for productivity, quality, or in any way. Instead, the output of the team working on the whole assembly line was the issue.
Deming was very quotable, and came up with countless aphorisms. A couple of them that apply to this example are:
“Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.”
and
“Management by results – like driving a car by looking in rear view mirror.”
Deming’s work includes far more than I can note here. Fortunately his books are still in print, and the Demings Institute works to disseminate them. I’ll leave you with two of the “deadly diseases” Deming identified as failure points in corporations:
“Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance.”
“Emphasis on short-term (quarterly) profits.”
