Management

Inspection checklist

Sep 12 2012

Deming’s Point 3 of 14 – Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality…

Deming’s 3rd point is the first to mention quality, and it is specific, even if its implementation is sometimes a tall order. Its complete statement is as follows:

“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.”

The idea that quality should be built into the design of the products and into the processes to manufacture them has come to be generally accepted in the past 30 years, and implemented in many industries. You never hear anyone arguing against it. At the same time, final inspection and test has never completely disappeared, even in the car industry. Engines, for example, are all tested before moving on to assembly, even at the best manufacturers, and body paint is visually inspected by people.

In the details he gives about this point, Deming acknowledges that there are exceptions where no one knows how to build quality into the process. In particular, he mentions integrated circuits. It is still true in 2012, and the economic importance of this “exception” has grown in the past 30 years. There are also other, older technology products for which there is no alternative to sorting the output. Lead shot, for example, is produced by pouring molten lead into a sieve, collecting the solidified drops, sorting the ones that are sufficiently round based on their ability to roll down chutes, and recycling the others.

Oddly, Deming includes “calculations and other paperwork” in a bank among the activities for which mistakes are “inevitable but intolerable.” Today, an individual using on-line bill-pay to settle a utility bill expects that the exact amounts will be properly debited and credited without human intervention. If, on the other hand, you are occasionally transferring $300K from Russia to the US, you can expect humans to validate the transaction.

At least in Out of the Crisis, Deming does not distinguish between inspection and testing. Inspection is a manual process, subject to human error and to dilution of responsibility when a product is subject to multiple inspections, which is why he describes it as ineffective as a filter for defectives. At the end of their process, however,  integrated circuits are not inspected by humans but tested on automatic test equipment that, if properly calibrated, provides consistent results. The relevance of these results depends on the human process of programming the test equipment; the productivity of test operations, on the sequencing of the tests.

Because inspection and test is perceived as  “non-value added,” it has a bad odor in the Lean community, and is ignored in its literature. Today, however, it is something we have to do, and we might as well do it well. Deming discusses it in Chapter 15 of Out of the Crisis;  I, in Chapter 16 of Lean Assembly .

By • Deming • 6 • Tags: , ,

Sep 11 2012

How to Break Free from Email Jail

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

How often are people’s email privileges suspended (aka, “mail jail”) because they’re inundated with a blizzard of questions, status updates, notifications, and other non-mission critical information? Most inboxes — and calendars — are gorged with junk because the dominant paradigm of communication is information “push.” This means that information is being pushed onto people when it’s ready, but not necessarily when the recipient needs it. Think of all of the emails and documents you have going back and forth. Irrespective of the value of the information, how often is it relevant to you at that moment?

See on blogs.hbr.org

By • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: ,

Philosophy -- Old versus New

Sep 10 2012

Deming’s point 2 of 14: Adopt the new philosophy…

This is the most cryptic of all of Deming’s points:

“Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.”

This could have been said, with different meanings, at any time in the past 200 years. It could be said today, about a “new philosophy” that would not be the one Deming was referring to 30 years ago.  What was new in 1982 or even 1986 may be long in the tooth in 2012. Also,  is there such a thing as “Western management” as a common approach spanning the Americas and Western Europe? In the elaboration on this point, Deming asserts “We are in a new economic age, created by Japan.”

Deming’s 2nd point could be rephrased as “study and adopt Japanese management,” but it still would not be specific. It certainly made sense for car companies to learn the Toyota Production System, as they eventually more or less did, but Japan is 130 million people and more than 1 millions companies, engaging in all sorts of behaviors, not all of which are worthy of emulation. In addition, explicit references to another nation are counterproductive when you are trying to implement anything, as they instantly elicit the response that “it won’t work here.”

To make his point, Deming dives from the stratosphere of philosophy to the nitty-gritty of train schedules. Japanese trains, today as well as 30 years ago, run fast, frequently, and on time, which certainly enhances your traveling experience. As a train engineer told me in 1977,  “It’s a very interesting country, from a railroad point of view.” When I returned from Japan 18 months later, I brought him a copy of the latest schedule, which was sold at newsstands and looked like a small phone book. 34 years later, I crisscrossed Japan  for a week with tight connections and never missed one. It is radically different from using high-speed trains in Germany (ICE) or France (TGV). The Japanese high-speed trains, the Shinkansen, are no longer the fastest in the world, but what is most remarkable about them is that, if you stand close to the Tokyo-Osaka line, you see trains of 16 carriages roll by at 150 tp 200 mph every few minutes, as shown in Figure 1. By contrast,  TGVs from Paris to Lyon run about once an hour, and often late.

Figure 1. Schedule of Shinkansen departures from Tokyo to Osaka and beyond

And punctuality in public transportation in Japan is not limited to the Shinkansen: if you stand on a country road, with a schedule that calls for a bus to come by at 4:36PM, you see it coming round the bend at 4:35PM.

One good reason to point this out to American managers in the 1980s was that such a quality of service could not be explained by hard work, low wages, or protectionism. It required advanced technology and management, engagement of the work force, and attention to details. Furthermore, from 1964 to 1981, the Shinkansen was the only train of its kind in the world.

While the Shinkansen and its operations are a wonder to behold, it also has characteristics that have made it impossible to sell outside of Japan. It uses a wide gauge and cannot run at reduced speeds on regular tracks like the French TGV or the German ICE, as a result of which the Shinkansen network requires many more specially built bridges and tunnels.

Figure 2. Shinkansen tracks versus regular Japanese tracks

In fact, the only stretch on which traffic is intense enough to run profitably is the original Tokyo-Osaka line, and some lines are known to have been built because a powerful politician wanted his district served. Japan is a place where you find the Shinkansen and many other engineering marvels, but it is not immune to major errors in business planning and has its share of bridges to nowhere. It is not an ideal society, as Deming must have known, but a real, flawed one, comprised of 130 million fallible human beings.

In the US, fear of Japanese competition peaked in the late 1980s, and ebbed in the 1990s when the country entered a long recession that it has yet to overcome. In 2012, the focus of attention is China, not Japan. Not everything about Japan is worth following, and it was a mistake to believe so, but it is also a mistake to go back to ignoring it. In manufacturing, the most advanced concepts in both technology and management are still  found in the best Japanese factories, and the Japanese literature on the subject has no equivalent anywhere else.

But none of this tells us what the “new philosophy” is. By riding trains and visiting factories, you can observe practices, but not their underlying principles.  And you need these principles to develop corresponding practices in other contexts. There isn’t a single such philosophy for the whole of Japan. Instead, each successful organization has its own, which may or may not be explicitly stated, and if stated for internal use, is not necessarily shared with the world. In Out of the Crisis, the 14 points are the closest there is to the statement of a philosophy. Therefore this points essentially says that they the others should be adopted.

By • Deming • 15 • Tags: ,

Gabby Douglas - Constancy of purpose

Sep 7 2012

Deming’s point 1 of 14: Create constancy of purpose…

Deming’s full statement is as follows:

“Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive, stay in business and to provide jobs.”

We can breaks this down into several components:

  1. You should always be improving what your customers are paying you for, whether goods or services.
  2. You do this in order to:
    • Compete, presumably against anyone worldwide.
    • Stay in business, presumably forever.
    • Provide jobs.

The most surprising piece is the mention of providing jobs as a goal. It is a goal for society at large, but a company creates jobs when it has to, and does not make it a goal. What Deming is really after, however, is not job creation but retention. As he elaborates on this point, he is saying that, instead of worrying exclusively about quarterly profits, companies should have a longer term strategy involving innovation, investments in research and education, and constant improvement in products or services – as well as internal processes – and that no employees should lose their jobs for contributing to improvements.

Most of his readers in the 1980s would have readily agreed on the need for a strategy, but would at best have paid lip service to the need to retain people. 30 years later, the management of most American companies is even less committed to its work force, and practices like rank-and-yank make firings routine, even in the absence of economic need. The few companies that have implemented the Human Resources part of Lean can claim to follow Deming on this point.

Although he does not say it in so many words, it is clear from what he says in other parts of the book, is that “making profits every quarter” is not an appropriate purpose, whatever constancy you pursue it with. Your purpose should be in terms of goods or services provided to a population of customers, with profits a by-product of doing this well.

How do you create constancy of purpose? As a necessary condition, it seems that a purpose would have to be articulated and communicated to all stakeholders, and serve as an overarching hoshin for the organization. This is what today’s Mission Statements are supposed to do.

Some of them don’t live up to this expectation. GM’s mission statement, for example, is as follows:

“G.M. is a multinational corporation engaged in socially responsible operations, worldwide. It is dedicated to provide products and services of such quality that our customers will receive superior value while our employees and business partners will share in our success and our stock-holders will receive a sustained superior return on their investment.”

From it, you would not guess that the company makes cars and trucks. The statement reads like keywords strung together. The only specific thing it says is that the company exists to make money for stock-holders. Ford’s is equally cagey:

“Ford Motor Company is focused on creating a strong business that builds great products that contribute to a better world.”

A cheese maker could say the same.

Schlumberger, on the other hand, describes itself as follows:

“The world’s leading oilfield services company supplying technology, information solutions and integrated project management that optimize reservoir performance for customers working in the oil and gas industry.”

Neither a cheese maker nor a car company could say that. From that one sentence, we know which market the company serves and what it provides. To managers inside the company, it provides a clear direction on what to pursue and what to stay away from.

This is a company founded in 1926 with over $39B in sales in 2011. 25 years ago, it could not have made such a clear statement of purpose, because it had diversified into unrelated areas: besides providing oilfield services, it was making household meters for electricity, water and gas, smart cards, and semiconductor chips. It has since then sold off all these businesses and refocused on the activity for which it had been founded.

Google’s mission statement is also clear and specific:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Companies diversify to hedge against the instability or cyclicality of their original businesses. A consequence of diversification it that it shifts management’s focus away from products and services. Mission statements then can express no other constant purpose than making money at all times, which Deming brands a deadly disease in Chapter 3 of Out of the Crisis.

Managers believe they can combine unrelated businesses, because they think of management as a generic skill, portable from oilfield services to semiconductors, from sugary water to computers, or from dessert toppings to floor wax. There are individual success stories, like Carlos Ghosn going from tires to cars, or Alan Mulally from airplanes to cars, but it is  a different challenge for a company to take over another in a different business, and failures are common. If a company operates by Deming’s 1st point, it has a purpose that can be stated in a mission statement in terms of products and services. Conglomerates clearly don’t, but then, neither do Korean Chaebols or Japanese Keiretsus, and such structures still include some of the world’s best known companies, like GE, Hyundai, or Mitsubishi.

By • Deming • 5 • Tags: ,

Deming 14 points

Sep 4 2012

Rereading Deming’s 14 points

The richest discussion in this blog to date, on Deming versus Drucker,  is all about point 11.b. from the list of 14 points that is the best known legacy of Deming’s 1986 book  Out of the Crisis. But what are his actual 14 points, and who are they intended for? Let us start with Deming’s own summary, from p. 23 of the book:

  1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive, stay in business and to provide jobs.
  2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
  3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.
  4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
  5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
  6. Institute training on the job.
  7. 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.
  8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (See Ch. 3 of Out of the Crisis)
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute with leadership.
    b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute with leadership.
  12. a. 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.
    b. 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).
  13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
  14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

On the face of it, this is an odd mixture of actionable recommendations — like “a single supplier for any one item” — with generalities like “adopt the new philosophy,” and expressions like “a vigorous program” that don’t meet Deming’s own criteria for an operational definition (See Ch. 9 of Out of the Crisis). As a consequence, the summary is not sufficient to understand what Deming actually meant.

Deming elaborates on each point in the remainder of Ch. 2 but, contrary to what the reader might expect, the whole book is not organized around the 14 points. About 20 years after Deming, in  The Toyota Way, Liker also identified 14 principles, and then devoted a chapter to each, which gives the reader a sense of structure that is missing in Deming’s book.

On the other hand, what comes out of Deming’s book is a sense of urgency. He was in his eighties when he wrote it,  a celebrated figure in Japan but obscure in the US until 1980 when NBC aired its documentary If Japan Can… Why Can’t We?  In the early 1980s, industries like steel, cars, semiconductors, and consumer electronics in the US were facing formidable competition from Japan, but most American managers credited it to long working hours for low wages and unfair trade practices. The idea that there was anything to learn from Japan was a hard sell, and only a few, well-informed individuals like Deming knew that it was the case.

Deming obviously felt he had much to say to American management that was essential to future competitiveness, and little time to say it. He couldn’t afford to sugarcoat his message and didn’t have the leisure to organize it into a neat theory. His readers would just have to handle the truth and organize the parts themselves.

Deming is blunt and direct, and backs up his assertions with examples. He is often prophetic but, in hindsight from 2012, occasionally off the mark. He correctly predicted that Japan would achieve a standard of living on a par with the US and Western Europe, but he perceived the breakup of the AT&T monopoly as “wrecking our system of telephone communication” (p.152), which works pretty well for a wreck.

One criticism I have for all lists of 14 points, whether from Woodrow Wilson, Deming, or Liker, is that they are impossible to remember. They should have boiled their lists down to 7 or even 5 points. I will have more detailed comments on each point in forthcoming posts.

By • Deming • 16 • Tags: , ,

Deming versus Drucker

Aug 26 2012

Deming’s Point 11.b of 14 – Deming versus Drucker

In his 14 points, by saying “Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals,” Deming directly attacks Peter Drucker, the most revered guru of American management and creator of Management-By-Objectives (MBO). By the time Deming contradicted him, Drucker was an American institution, as sacred as the constitution. Drucker has published a new book every two to three years from 1939 to 2005 and contributed more than 30 articles to the Harvard Business Review. He received numerous awards from several governments, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, and has streets and a business school named after him.

In the Lean world, MBO has been replaced by Hoshin Planning, which is subtly but radically different. Drucker’s influence in the US remains so strong, however, that my favorite book on Hoshin Planning, Pascal Dennis’s Getting the Right Things Done, actually pays homage to him. The title itself is Drucker’s definition of effectiveness and, inside, Dennis presents Hoshin Planning as a refinement of MBO. It is still easier today to get through to an audience of American managers by standing on Drucker’s shoulders than by debunking him.

But Deming was in his eighties when he wrote his 14 points, his success in Japan had finally given him an audience in the US, and he must have known that he was running out of time to make his points. He thought MBO was a bad idea  and he would not pussyfoot. 15 years later, Drucker himself came around to the same point of view and recognized that MBO had failed. What did Deming find wrong with it?

In The Practice of Management (1954), Drucker repeatedly asserts that it is essential for managers to have quantitative objectives to work towards. They should set these objectives themselves, consistent with the objectives of the business as a whole. But Drucker is short on how this could actually be done, how you identify proper metrics, how you set targets for each metric, and how you go about reaching these targets. It is not an accidental omission. In  Drucker’s world, managers can find the answers themselves. It is part of their job, and they are supposed to have the requisite talents.

Instead,  Deming sees arbitrary objectives, unrelated to the purpose of the business, set without any plan on how to achieve them or even a means of taking accurate measurements. Deming sees MBO as “an attempt to manage without knowledge of what to do.” The managers focus on outcomes without looking into the processes that produce them. They end up gaming metrics rather than improving  processes, and playing management whack-a-mole.

About managing by numbers, Deming notes that performance evaluations of groups or individuals fail to  differentiate between fluctuations and outliers. Whether you measure quantities produced or units sold, there will always be a ranking, but top performance only indicates a difference in effort or talent if it is high enough to be an outlier. Otherwise, it would be just as meaningful to rank people based on the number of heads in 50 coin tosses.

Deming makes the case that fluctuations should never be the basis for management decisions. If you sell a product through three dealers of equal talent and resources, with territories of equal sales potential, you will still observe differences in results that will enable you to rank the dealers, even though these differences are just the luck of the draw for this particular period.

What Deming does not go into is what happens when you repeat this kind of ranking over a sequence of periods. If the first period was a fair competition, the following are not, as the top performing dealer starts receiving preferential treatment, such as an award to post in the show room, priority access to new products and marketing materials, and special training in sales or customer support. All of these advantages make it more likely that the ranking will be the same in the next period, with a larger gap. Revisiting Pareto shows how iterations of a pure game of luck can lead to the top 20% of the players holding 80% of the chips when the outcome of each round determines the probabilities of success in the next round.

If one of the dealers sold not 5% more but three times as much as the other two, it would be difficult to explain it away as a fluctuation or a fluke. It would be most likely due to the use of a different and more effective approach, which would warrant special treatment.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the story of MBO is that its poor performance has made no dent in Drucker’s reputation as a business thinker, and that many companies continue to use it.

By • Deming • 82 • Tags: , , ,

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