DEMING - MANAGEMENT  THEORY

I have had the great privilege of learning directly from Dr. W. Edwards Deming, as I was a "willing worker" in his red-bead experiment.  I worked along side Dr. Deming to adopt his principles of management to improve quality, reduce cost, and improve customer loyalty.

Deming System of Profound Knowledge

 

  1. Appreciation of a system: Understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers of goods and services.
  2. Knowledge of variation: The range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;
  3. Theory of knowledge: The concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known.
  4. Knowledge of psychology: Concepts of human nature.

Deming Guiding Principles

 

  • Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive, to stay in business and to provide jobs.
  • 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.
  • Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.  Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.
  • 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.
  • Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
  • Institute training on the job.
  • Institute leadership.  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.
  • Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
  • Break down barriers between departments.  People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and usage that may be encountered with the product or service.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship.  This means, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives.
  • Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
  • Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation.  The transformation is everybody's job.
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