The problem with using Deming's ideas, SPC or anything of that nature is this....

Far too often it is viewed as the be all and end all of quality and it is not.

In the end it all comes down to the people using the processes. You can have the tightest most efficient and elegant manufacturing process in the world but that does not guarantee a quality product.

If your people using the process do not care about what they do, if they just go along to get along, your entire quality assurance process will spend its time addressing errors, and never have a chance to spend the thought and effort to achieve improvements.

If you had a workforce and management team consisting of John Gaults that would not be true because they would all be doing the best job they possibly could.

Unfortunately that doesn't happen in the real world. What you wind up with is something between a Gault level product and utter crap, and a responsible company that wants to stay in business tries to get that product as close to the Gault level as they can.

So Deming and all the other QC programs/processes/pick a term, are an effort to bring the end product up to a standard. Meanwhile the money people try to save money wherever they can and often QC is an easy target.

Almost never do they, either QC or the company as a whole, attempt to either exceed or raise the "standard" of the product being produced.

Quality Control is probably one of the most frustrating segments to work in there is.

Very well said, woodlema.

RikNilsson and blarman, did you hear that Agilent (the successor to HP) is splitting in two? I save up a year's worth of news items to read and get to them this week of the summer, but I noticed that in what I read just this AM.

The leapfrogging companies come up with an innovation rather than an incremental improvement.

"Let me say first that THERE S NO BOX!!!, Just think and solve the problem."

BULLSEYE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Completely agree. Once Hewlett and Packard no longer ran the company, things began going downhill. It really accelerated under Fiorina (I worked there during her disastrous tenure).

Implementing Deming's ideas is hard work. I was part of DOD when the Secretary of Defense thought it was a good idea and 'ordered' DOD to implement it. That is not how it works. Leaders have to do it. They can not order it to happen.

Companies such as Toyota move ahead while others such as GM fall into bankruptcy. Toyota did implement Deming's TQM ideas while GM paid lip service to it.

Nothing I saw in my study of TQM would have inhibited innovation. There are examples of where it encouraged it. As with many great ideas, the failure is in the implementation.

Deming is wrong for American business so long as business leaders are part of the 'old boys network' rather then being actually competent in their field of work. Sam Walton built a company that just about put Sears, K Mart, etc. out of business. Walton was his own man while Sears, etc are managed by 'professional' good old boys who can not stand the competition from anyone who thinks.

HP hosted Deming. That doesn't mean they implemented what it took him his whole life to discover. My last sentence stands, for HP too.

I think the answer is in Pirsig's work on the Metaphysics of Quality. You have to know what quality is before you can check for it. Quality isn't always zero defects. Sometimes innovation has to evolve with zero defects to meet the market expectations driven by market forces.

I agree with you.

These are some very good comments.

I've worked in manufacturing and mechanical engineering for over 25 years and his statistical methods to improve quality and increase profit seem to be the kind of science that Ayn Rand champions. I don't know enough about any other aspect of Deming's life or political opinions to offer any criticism.

There is a balance that MUST be reached. The companies that get leapfrogged are the same ones that in the end are around long after the "Out of the Box" thinkers have gone the way of the Dodo.

Let me say first that THERE S NO BOX!!!, Just think and solve the problem.

Deming provided a framework to identify and fix quality issues. Look at GM and the many, many millions of recalls. Had they applied even a fraction of Deming's quality control they would not be losing billions, along with customer loyalty.

The entire concept that providing a solid framework to identify quality issues prevents innovation, and keeps companies from progressing rapidly and "keeping up" is a fallacy.

Deming was asked by a reporter, "Is experience important?" Deming's reply. "Not if you're doing it wrong."

I have spent several years inside General Electric, who use Six Sigma and Deming's framework almost to a fault. I my opinion they take this to an extreme, and yes in my opinion they do not necessarily move as quickly as they could, but take away the quality control framework, and you would be looking at a behemoth corporate conglomerate that would cave in on itself from recalls and faulty products.

Take away all quality control and replace it with "Agile" Ad-Hoc BS, and you would still not be able to move quickly simply due to the enormity of the company.

The Rule of 7's.
1.Cause and effect diagram (fishbone, Ishikawa) - creative way to look at possible problem causes.
2.Control charts - shows how a process behaves over time; plots results against control limits (usually +/- 3 sigma). Data within limits indicate the process is in control, but watch for rule of 7: 7 consecutive results on one side of the mean could indicate a problem. X bar is the average of a series of measurements; R is the difference between the highest and lowest values for a period, R bar is the average of all the R values.

Sigma: Another name for standard deviation; indicates how much of the curve is within control limits. 1 sigma = 68.26%, 2 sigma = 95.46%, 3 sigma = 99.73%, 6 sigma = 99.99985%.

If you strive for 6 Sigma, imagine GM again.

It's only May, but automakers have recalled 22.3 million vehicles in the United States. That's already more than last year — and it's on pace to shatter the previous record set in 2000: (http://www.vox.com/2014/5/21/5738204/rec...)

GM sold since 1998 61,475,860 cars. They have recalled 22.3 million. where is that on the Six Sigma quality chart? Not even 1 Sigma. How much did that Cost GM? How much is that going to cost GM?

Ayn Rand is a proponent of and please remember this "RATIONAL SELF INTEREST." Self interest is in producing a product that provide value for the monetary or "consideration" provided. Ayn Rand I believe would say oh well, the market just took out another bad company who did not apply Rational Self Interest" properly. Rational Self interest is providing a product that is not going to blow up in your face causing your customer base to leave you and/or sue you out of business. I am waiting for another Government bailout of GM at our expense that Ayn Rand would certainly oppose with every fiber of her being.

She would say Let GM die.

Deming is basically a continuous improvement cycle. For continuous processes, especially those that have not been in place for a long time, it can show significant improvement. Most processes get incremental improvement over time if participants care without a formal process.

The cycles get leapfrogged whenever there is revolutionary rather than evolutionary development. Revolution comes from out of the box, or foundationally re-thinking the how's and why's of the process.

Not all improvement processes are reasonable for every situation.

ALL process can use re-thinking. Staying with the status-quo if there isn't a reason to change is an appropriate answer (reduces risk and cost of change) but staying with the status-quo just because of being afraid of change is not a solution for fixing processes or procedures either.

I have yet to find a process that can't be improved, but not all processes show the amount of improvement that will pay for the change cycle effort.

Typically I find evolutionary change to result in 1 to 3% improvements, but revolutionary changes are typically disruptive and require 10 to 500+% improvement to be worth the effort.

Deming got some things wrong, and a lot of things right. He was extremely intelligent. I think Ms. Rand would have enjoyed some spirited discussions with him. In some areas, probably many, they would have agreed. In others they would have politely agreed to disagree. I seriously doubt there would have been much, if any, animosity.

Government regulation of the economy for the "greater good" has done far more harm than businesses voluntarily adapting Deming's ideas.

Having worked at HP for seven years, I can tell you right now that this quality mentality was thrown out the window many years ago. Where HP was once the gold standard for equipment (especially testing meters and hard drives), they are now no more than another personal electronics manufacturer.

I think point 5 is particularly important. Modern accounting systems do not attach R&D costs to products. Because of that, investment in invention is difficult to to objectively determine risk/reward. As well, the more the manager is removed from R&D, the less innovation you will see the larger the corporate structure

I once attended a Deming lecture at HP in Cupertino, CA. Over an hour, he filled the board in front of a grand corporate auditorium with ‘quality control’ calculations. In the last five minutes he admitted that it all could be reduced to a simple equation relating cost of replacement/repair of a defective unit at any given point in a manufacturing process. It was to point out that it is too easy to make something complicated that is really very simple, and what made HP computers and Volkswagon America’s cars so reliable: if you don’t let garbage in, you won’t put garbage out. In reality, that applies to human resources as well as materials, something corporate and public America never really embraced in full.

Deming's 7 Deadly Diseases:

The Seven Deadly Diseases can be summarized as:

1. Lack of constancy of purpose to plan products and services.
2. Emphasis on short-term profits.
3. Personal review systems for managers and management by objectives.
4. Job hopping by managers.
5. Using only visible data in decision making.
6. Excessive medial costs.
7. Excessive costs of liability driven up by lawyers that work on contingency.

Read more: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/mana...

Agreed. I am trying to re-locate the quote from Deming where he said that 90% of all Quality issues can be traced directly to Sr. Management.

Do the leapfrogging companies use SPC or do they rely only on 100% inspection to insure a quality product?