03.23.10
Who Taught Who?
[Cartoon]
William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900 – December 20, 1993) is heralded as the father of modern American quality improvement in manufacturing. He was recognized in 1980 in an NBC documentary titled “If Japan can… Why can’t we?” In this documentary, Deming described the approach used by the Japanese to manufacture products with greater quality than comparable products from the United States. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the automobile industry.
The Japanese approach was based upon individual teams given the responsibility and accountability for the parts they produced and the assembly processes they used. Using this approach, the teams would make small, highly tested, improvements to the product or to the manufacturing process. Then, once in production, feedback measurements would be used to determine the success of the improvement.
This was in contrast to the American approach. Marketing and Design worked closely together to develop improvements in a centralized, top-down manner. The production teams ran the line with little input to the product or the production process.
Cultural differences made it difficult to fully adopt the Japanese approach, so it was adopted by American manufactures with some adjustments. Today, this adopted approach has come together in the form of Six Sigma. American manufacturing can now compete with any other country on quality.
With this great history in Japan, why are we having such serious problems with Toyota? Why do we not hear from the teams with the responsibility for the failing parts? Why are we hearing that the President of Toyota will personally form a centralized, top-down team to get to the bottom of these problems? Have they abandoned their team approach?
It appears that Toyota has begun to take on the look of American manufacturing of the ‘80s. It appears that Toyota has forgotten that quality is what made them successful and teams are what made quality work.
What quality-minded organizations need is to provide their teams with an environment in which they can flourish. This means that the organization provides the teams with a clear visual of their goals and resources. This means that the teams are given the tools and time to collaborate. For manufacturing, the resources include the technical descriptions of the production plant. For software development, the resources are defined in the Enterprise Architecture.
Teams are important. They are the backbone of any quality manufacturing environment from automobiles to software. Teams should be given the responsibility and accountability with just rewards for outcomes. This is the Deming way.
Closing the Business / IT gap
