Out of the Crisis

People that expect quick results are doomed to disappointment

As William E. Conway said, measurements of productivity are like accident statistics. They tell you that there is a problem, but they don’t do anything about accidents. This book is an attempt to improve productivity, not just to measure it.

Anyone in management requires, for transformation, some rudimentary knowledge about science—in particular, something about the nature of variation and about operational definitions.

Failure to appreciate the two kinds of variation, special causes of variation and common causes, and to understand operational de�nitions brings loss and demoralization.

The level of mistakes, and the variation day to day, were accordingly predictable. What does this mean? It means that here is a stable system for production of defective items. Any substantial improvement must come from action on the system, the responsibility of management. Wishing and pleading and begging the workers to do better was totally futile.

People on the job did not understand well enough what kind of work is acceptable and what is not.

Without statistical control, the process was in unstable chaos.

Defects are not free. Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them. On the supposition that it costs as much to correct a defect as to make it in the first place, then 42 per cent of his payroll and burden was being spent to make defective items and to repair them.

Next step: reduce further the proportion defective in a never-ending program of improvement. The cost of rework is only part of the cost of poor quality. Poor quality begets poor quality and lowers productivity all along the line, and some of the faulty product goes out the door, into the hands of the customer. An unhappy customer tells his friends. The multiplying effect of an unhappy customer is one of those unknown and unknowable figures, and likewise for the multiplying effect of a happy customer, who brings in business

Measures of productivity do not lead to improvement in productivity productivity.

Measurement of productivity does not improve productivity

The transformation can only be accomplished by man, not by hardware. A company can not buy its way into quality.