Page 196 - DMGT501_OPERATIONS_MANAGEMENT

Operations Management

Notes rejection on antagonism to “Japanese workaholics” grounds. Even in Japan many quality circles
have collapsed, usually because of managements lack of interest or excessive intervention.
However, many have worked. There are now more than 10 million circle members there. The
benefits are typically seen as being minor from any one improvement introduced by a quality
circle, but that added together they represent substantial improvements to the company.
Perhaps more importantly, greater worker involvement and motivation is created through:
1. An atmosphere where employees are continuously looking to resolve problems,
2. Greater commercial awareness

3. A change of shopfloor attitude in aiming forever increasing goals.
Quality circles have been vigorously marketed in the West as a means of improving quality.
There seems to be agreement, however, that they cannot be used naively, and take careful
adoption for use in Western companies. Adoptions have been various and of varying effectiveness;
in some companies circles have been successful, or regarded as such, in others they have failed.
Many commentators, such as Philip Crosby, have warned against the fashion for quality circles
as a cure-all for poor employee motivation or inadequate quality and productivity in either
white-collar areas or on the shopfloor. The senior American Quality Guru Joseph Juran, in
particular, has gone further, in throwing doubts on their likely effectiveness in the West at all
where few company hierarchies are permitted with executives trained in quality management.

W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993)

Known as the father of quality, Deming was a statistics professor at New York University
during the 40s. He studied for several years with Walter Shewhart; this was the base of his
contribution to quality. After World War II, Deming was involved in assisting Japanese companies
to reborn from their own ashes. His contribution was in improving quality, by setting a 14
points principles which should be the foundation for achieving quality improvements. Japanese
companies applied extensively these principles; today’s power of Japan and quality of their
products has a strong root in this matter. Deming emphasized on the role of management in
achieving quality. He noted that around 15% of poor quality was because of workers, and the
rest of 85% was due to bad management, improper systems and processes. In his opinion,
managers should involve employees in solving the problems, not simply to blame them for
poor quality. Deming’s 14 principles are:
1. Create constancy of purpose (short term reactions has to be replaced by long-term
planning),

2. Adopt the new philosophy (management should adopt his philosophy, rather than to
expect the employees to do that),
3. Cease dependence on inspection (it concerns to variation in other words, if there is no
variation, no inspection is needed because all products shows no defects),
4. Move towards a single supplier for any one item (working with several suppliers,
automatically involves variation in raw materials),
5. Improve constantly and forever (it refers to decreasing variation, as a key to better quality),

6. Institute training on the job (another source of variation is the lack of training of workers;
train them properly to do a certain job, and they will do it with far less variation),
7. Institute leadership (distinction between leadership and supervising),

8. Drive out fear (eliminate fear at worker’s level to get their support for improvements.
Fear is counter productive),

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