Something I ran across again yesterday

If you ever hear me talk and my approach to Manufacturing, I always tell people that I am a Demingist. What this is is the ideas established by Dr. W. Edwards Deming and his approach to manufacturing and running a business.

I was first exposed to Dr. Demings work when I worked for the Helmick Corporation for much of the 1990's. At the time we were a company that needed all the help and we were exposed to dr. Demings teachings.

Needless to say to make a long story short, we ended up closing down the Foundry and I was out of a job, BUT I had garnered an interest in Dr. Demings's teachings and his business models. I actually tried to do some independent research on him in while I was in college, but there just wasn't enough things out there available and at my disposal. Good thing for the internet and Wikipedia. Now there is more information out there on a man I never had the pleasure in meeting but was inspired by his work.

Yesterday I stumbled across his Fourteen steps to a successful business that inspred me a decade ago, enjoy:


1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service with a plan to become competitive and to stay in business. Decide whom top management is responsible to.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. We can no longer live with commonly accepted levels of delays, mistakes, defective materials, and defective workmanship.

3. Cease dependence on mass inspection. Require, instead, statistical evidence that quality is built in. (Prevent defects rather than detect defects.)

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, depend on meaningful measures of quality, along with price. Eliminate suppliers that cannot qualify with statistical evidence of quality.

5. Find problems. It is management’s job to work continually on the system (design, incoming materials, composition of material, maintenance, improvement of machine, training, supervision, retraining.)

6. Institute modern methods of training on the job.

7. The responsibility of foremen must be changed from sheer numbers to quality ... [which] will automatically improve productivity. Management must prepare to take immediate action on reports from foremen concerning barriers such as inherent defects, machines not maintained, poor tools, fuzzy operational definitions.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production that may be encountered with various materials and specifications.

10. Eliminate numerical goals, posters, and slogans for the work force, asking for new levels of productivity without providing methods.

11. Eliminate work standards that prescribe numerical quotas.

12. Remove barriers that stand between the hourly worker and his [or her] right to pride of workmanship.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and retraining.

14. Create a structure in top management that will push every day on the above 13 points.