The Deming Chain Reaction
REFLECTION: FOR STUDENTS: How can you weave Quality into all Management endeavors to help sustain what you are managing?
FOR ACADEMICS: How can I incorporate MORE quality concepts into class/classroom management?
FOR PROFESSIONALS/PRACTITIONERS: Do you operate in a firefighting mode, preventive mode, or risk management mode? Are those quality decisions ever made by the front line operators, or is it managers who solve the problems?
The “Whats” of Quality Culture
During my 20 years of experience as a Quality Professional I have witnessed a similar pattern emerge constantly. One book I read (Angle, 2019) captured the essence of what happens with just three observations, that I can firmly attest to as the three most impactful “Whats” that I have seen.
-The First “What” was: Sustainable Corrective Actions were not properly enacted to address noted quality failures. Pencil whipping corrective actions to meet a deadline or going after the immediate surface problem only allows the eventual recurrence of the issue.
-The second “What” was how curiously common it was for a company to not understand the power of Quality from the highest ranks, deep into the culture, and how critical not understanding the need to monitor the existence and state of the Culture of Quality was to the company. Reactive measures are firefighting tasks brought on by the need for a quick fix. A culture that chooses to ignore quality and go for the non-sustainable path will imprint those same values across the entire organization. When the organization is short term focused, so are it’s employees, so quality and profit fall over the long term.
-The third and final “What” is far more common: There may be no true strategy for Quality. No strategy for Continuous Improvement, Change Management, or Strategic Alignment that is truly Quality Driven. Too often Quality is a department that measures and inspects, and any other decision is financially driven. Pure financial drive leads to non-measurement of quality costs, impacts, and ramifications (the infamous Hidden Factory), which tends exclude Quality from risk/based business decisions not related to regulated industries. ISO claims that “over a million” companies have been certified, so if I add, let us say, 9 million other companies with various other certified QMS systems (and I am being generous) then, (using the top 15 GDP countries for the low estimate and population extrapolation for high) out of the approximately 60-100 million companies in the world the % of companies with a certified QMS is 10% to 16%. **NOTE: [Not verified numbers, just estimates to convey the current state of quality in the business world based upon available data and the numbers are always in flux.] Certification only helps push a company toward a viable QMS. Though minding your P’s and Q’s helps, a viable QMS is in no way guaranteed by a certificate.
How a Culture of Quality Impacts the World
The end result of a company allowing any one of these “Whats” to manifest beyond the level of “I’m new to this quality thing” stage of an employee’s professional development is usually to the detriment of the company’s reputation, customer retention, and the company’s ability to obtain the best ROI. Those who argue for quick and dirty quality are selling snake oil. Quick and Dirty is the Challenger disaster management mentality of “I’m in charge! NASA expects this bird in orbit! I don’t care if all the engineers in the world are telling me that it might be too big a risk!”
Human nature is to break the rules, and it takes a true Quality Culture of excellence to hold an organization to a consistent level of excellence beyond that of normal human nature. Evan a well-designed system is useless if it can be overridden by customer demand, time constraints or public pressure that might jeopardize public safety, of the safety of even one human (Bombardier Business Aircraft, 2018).
Overcoming the tendency of humans to take the path of least resistance (especially in management) is a topic for another post, but The work of quality gurus such as W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran and Armand V. Feigenbaum helped enlighten Japan beginning in the 1950’s, and Japan took off with their teachings and enriched the concept, until Japan had risen from a country decimated by war to a major economic power. In the 1970’s America began to wake up to what was happening, and the work of Deming, Juran, Feigenbaum and then Philip B. Crosby, Taiichi Ohno, and Eiji Toyoda were recognized and the path was actively pursued in the West. All looked at the philosophy a little different, but they all understood how costly it was to ignore quality (especially from competitors). Eventually the economic result of a strong quality culture (that can still be seen in Toyota) was described by Deming as a Chain Reaction (ASQ, n.d.).
Basically: improve quality →decrease costs →improve productivity → increase market share with better quality, lower price → stay in business → provide more jobs, and now Toyota is (at this time) the most profitable automaker in the world (about twice GM’s profitability).
Improve quality can relate to every kind of buzzword, but the main goals are to reduce waste, reduce variation, and provide value to the customer (for which the customer would be willing to pay). Waste, Defects, Rework, Delays, all decrease, OEE goes up, Costs drop and productivity goes up, and you then have lots of higher quality and more desirable items on the market available at a lower price. Competitors can flood the market with cheap items, but quality lasts if it is not too expensive for the market, so your market share expands due to the ability to sell a higher quality product at a more affordable price. You stay in business and your company provides more jobs as they expand market share (Victor E. Sower, 2016).
Conclusion
Culture is king. Without a proper Quality Culture, the customer will never be properly served. The Voice of the Customer guides you, but the Culture is your company’s heart. If your heart is tainted with pure desire for profit, then you are not serving the customer, but yourself. The initial investment required to improve internally can be framed as non-customer focused by some, but always remember, that inward looking improvement of the company from management to the front line worker, across every department, and every process can only benefit the customer in the end. Due to the Pareto effect, the relatively vital few companies with a viable QMS and honest Culture of Quality do clearly have a significant economic impact on our world, and all companies should ask themselves: Do they want to be one of the Vital Few or Trivial Many?
Processing…
Success! You're on the list.
Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
Bibliography
Angle, A. S. (2019). Unleash Quality. Milwaukee: ASQ Quality Press.
ASQ. (n.d.). The History of Quality. Retrieved from https://asq.org/quality-resources/history-of-quality
Victor E. Sower, K. W. (2016, 07). Retrieved from Quality Progress: http://asq.org/quality-progress/2016/07/basic-quality/dead-or-alive.pdf
Bombardier Business Aircraft. (2018, June 1). The Normalization of Excellence. Retrieved from https://safetystanddown.com/en/normalization-excellence
Try Amazon Prime 30-Day Free Trial
Quality Concepts Matter 