Deming's Workflow

"If you give a manager a numerical target, he'll make it, even if he has to destroy the company in the process."

"A bad system will defeat a good person anytime"

"By adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations can increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs (by reducing waste, rework, staff attrition and litigation while increasing customer loyalty). The key is to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as bits and pieces."

• Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers (or recipients) of goods and services (explained below);
• Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;
• Theory of knowledge: the concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known.
• Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.

Quality = Result of work efforts / Total costs

When focusing primarily on quality : quality tends to increase and cost fall over times.

When focusing primarily on costs : costs tend to rise and quality declines over time.


Some key principles

1. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.
2. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
3. Institute training on the job.
4. Institute leadership (see Point 12 and Ch. 8 of "Out of the Crisis"). The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
5. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, in order to foresee problems of production and usage that may be encountered with the product or service.
6. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
7. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute with leadership.
8. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute with leadership.
9. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
10. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives (See Ch. 3 of "Out of the Crisis").
11. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
12. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.