Episode 151 - Quality Circles

Hi, I’m David Veech and this is Elevate your performance.

Let’s talk about Quality Circles; also known as Quality Control Circles or QC Circles.

Quality circles are small groups of employees with cross-functional skills who work together on a problem in the workplace to learn how to solve problems.

This is my definition based on my understanding of the INTENT of quality circles programs at Toyota and Honda.

The key outcome for quality circles is not the solution to the problem, but on having people learn, understand, and use the key problem solving process.  They of course learn by doing, so the solution is the gravy to the meat and potatoes of LEARNING.

I heard a story a long time ago about the birth of Quality Circles.  Let me remind you that Deming initiated the quality movement in Japan in the 1950s through his lecturing with the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers.  

Sometime in the mid to late 50s, after Deming had taught another group of managers and engineers the basics of Statistical Quality Control, someone is said to have asked him repeatedly about ways to get more employees involved in solving problems.  

The story says that Deming made a short, off the cuff remark about pulling a group of employees together after they’ve experienced a problem and have them stand in a circle to discuss and solve their own problems instead of calling someone else.

This informal, off-the-cuff comment sparked another movement in Japan that included a series of local, regional, and national QC-Circle conferences where workers who solved a problem through a QC circle would present their findings to an audience of peers, who would then select certain ones for awards and celebrations.

Joseph Juran, a contemporary of Deming’s, wrote several articles on Quality Circles in the mid-1960s, published in Quality Digest and other similar publications in the United States.  All of these were completely ignored, of course, until the 80’s when everything Japanese was duplicated, or at least we tried to duplicate.

I was in Grad School at Clemson in 1991 researching production systems when I first learned about Quality Circles.  I was studying self-directed work teams, but quality circles kept coming up in my research and my discussions with managers.  

A lot of companies tried to install Quality Circles programs in the 80s and 90s.  But as we are wont to do here, we usually mandated that every employee be assigned to a Quality Circle, and they would meet once a week and solve problems to save the company money.

This attitude had to come from Juran’s articles that said Japanese companies who participated in all these Quality Circles conferences reported saving about $10 Million annually through the programs.  

US companies wanted that $10 million bucks and missed the whole point about people volunteering, once a problem had occurred, and that other people would be recruited to join the circle with the full support of the company.  

Needless to say, most efforts in the US failed.  

I started studying quality circles at Toyota after I joined the University of Kentucky faculty in 2001.  Toyota maintained about 150 to 170 active quality circles at any given time.  They reported saving about $10 million from these efforts - a surprisingly consistent number.  

I discovered similar findings at Honda’s facility in Marysville, Ohio when I served on the board of IdeasAmerica.

I found this so cool that I wrote about creating circles in my book Leadersights.  Here, though, I called them Learning Circles in an effort to get the focus on developing people.  

I hope you’ll pick it up, read it and give it a try.  When you do, call me.  I’d love to help make your system more successful.

I hope you’re finding these videos helpful.  

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Have a great day and I’ll see you next time.

Episode 150 - Deming

Hi, I’m David Veech and this is Elevate your performance.

Last week, I introduced the birth of the Quality Movement which followed W. Edwards Deming’s series of lectures with the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers in 1950.

Today, I want to tease out a few more details about Deming, and make the controversial point that PDCA is NOT an effective problem solving methodology.  It’s great for product development and for continuous improvements, but not specifically for everyday problem solving.

I don’t claim to be a Deming expert.  My friend Mark Graban has a far greater understanding of Deming and his key contributions.  Much of what I will share here today came from an article published in Quality Progress in November 2010 by Ronald D. Moen and Clifford L. Norman.  I’ll paste the link in the description box.  http://www.apiweb.org/circling-back.pdf

I have to start the Deming story with Walter Shewhart.  Shewhart earned his doctorate in physics from Berkeley in 1917 and joined Western Electric’s Inspection Engineering Department at the Hawthorne Works in 1918.  You can learn a little more about AT&T, Bell Labs, and Western Electric in my video episodes 134 and 135.

Deming earned his doctorate in mathematical physics from Yale in 1928.  This is around the time when Deming discovered Shewhart’s work and wanted to apply his statistical quality control principles to non-manufacturing processes.  Apparently, they built a close relationship.  In 1939, Deming served as editor for Shewhart’s book 

“Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control.”  This is where the “Shewhart Cycle” first appeared, thanks to Deming.  

This 3 step cycle consisted of “Specification - Production - Inspection” but what made it different was that Shewhart insisted that this was circular, not linear as in most production systems.  As Deming continued to evolve Shewhart’s work for non-manufacturing processes, he joined the US Census Bureau and applied his theories there.  

Deming's refined 4-step cycle included "Design – Produce – Sell (Get to market) – Redesign through Market Research.” Deming made this modification in Japan in 1950, at a meeting of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE).

It was JUSE who relabeled the steps as Plan - Do - Check - Act and published this widely through Japan.  I don’t know if this was a “lost in translation” thing, or an effort by JUSE to simplify the language, but Deming called this “the corruption.”

Deming eventually warmed to the idea, but insisted that Check was insufficient for a learning cycle and focused instead of Study, giving us the PDSA cycle.  

Toyota still uses PDCA as their main thinking process - to drive continuous improvement.  For problem solving, they built their 7-step problem solving process around the PDCA cycle but had to add more descriptions.

I taught PDCA for years and everyone always struggled with the Plan part.  That’s mainly why I think PDCA is an Launch Cycle and an Improvement Cycle, not a problem-solving cycle to tackle everyday problems.  With lots of help, I created the C4 process to focus directly on problem solving with 4 key steps:  Concern, where you focus on finding, understanding, defining, and breaking down a problem; Cause, where you find the root causes; Countermeasure, where you take action to correct the problem at its root cause; and Confirm, where you study the result, learn, and celebrate.

Here’s what I want you to be thinking about:  Japan initiated their quality focus in the 1950’s.  I grew up in the 60’s and Japanese products were cheap crap.  In the 70’s, Japanese products were cheap, but they were no longer crap, particularly with electronics.  

By the mid 80’s, US Electronics and Automobile manufacturers were collapsing under the onslaught of high-quality, affordable Japanese products.   Thanks to an old NBC News documentary called “If Japan can, why can’t we?” America “discovered” Deming and launched our own quality revolution in the 80s.

The Quality movement in Japan took 30 years to shake the market.  It was a generational change.  Lean is also a generational change.  It will not succeed if we decide to focus on “implementation” of our favorite parts and ignore the rest; or if we change initiatives with every new leader.

Next up, I have a few stories about Deming, Juran, and the Quality Circles movement of the 1960s in Japan.  Subscribe, like, and comment!

Have a great day and I’ll see you next time.

Episode 149 - The Quality Movement

I’m David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

I’ve been making my way through the history of events and people who have shaped Toyota, enabling them to become the great company they are.

It started with Sakichi Toyoda, who’s known in Japan as the King of Inventors.  His Automatic Loom changed the game for the textile industry and provided seed money to start the Toyota Motor Company.

Sakichi’s son, Kiichiro and nephew, Risaburo focused on the passenger car business, first with an Automotive Division within the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works and later as the Toyota Motor Company.  They struggled to reengineer cars and engines from Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler.

Japan’s government asked them to design and build a truck for the military, which they did throughout World War II.  After the war, Kiichiro wanted to get back into the passenger car business as soon as possible, but the restrictions of the occupation government prevented them from achieving his goal of catching the Americans in 3 years.

Before I get too far away from the Automatic Loom Works, I want to point out that in 1949, an engineer from Toyoda Boshuku, named Taiichi Ono was promoted to General Manager of the Koromo Plant Machining Plant.  This facility integrated the engine and Powertrain plants.  Ono noticed that operators worked at a single machine, often just watching the machine as it ran.  The way that the automatic loom changed the game in textiles was instead of having one or more operators working each loom, now one operator could run a room full of looms, often up to 20.  Ono wanted to bring that practice to Koromo and initiated programs to add simple automation to machine tools so they could start and finish without human action, allowing one operator to work several machines.

1950 would turn out to be a significant year with labor disputes and turmoil, a tie-up agreement with Ford that allowed Eiji Toyoda to study their processes and facilities as well as those of dozens of other suppliers, and the Korean War, which actually hampered the Ford agreement and passenger car production.

Toyota did receive orders for 4,679 Model BM trucks to support the war and those orders stabilized the company financially.

In the late 1940’s, the United States sent representatives from the US Census Bureau to help prepare Japan for a 1950 census.  One of these representatives was W. Edwards Deming who had joined the Bureau in 1939 and applied statistical process control to their processes, significantly improving their productivity.

The Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers invited Deming to speak at one of their conferences, and as a result, he lectured in Japan for ten years teaching statistical process control and total quality management to as many as 20,000.  JUSE named their top national quality prize after Deming in 1951.  The quality movement had officially begun.

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Episode 146 - Training Within Industry

I’m David Veech and this is elevate your performance.

Sorry about the long break.  I had knee replacement surgery for my left knee and the recovery isn’t going as smoothly as I’d like.  It’s going well, but I’m in a hurry and some things you just can’t rush along.

Before the break, I’d been talking about Toyota.  I shared a little about their founding and growth and I want to complete that picture now with a few additional stories.

During World War II in the United States, the War Department created the Defense Production Board to monitor the production of military equipment and supplies.  With so many men volunteering for military service early on, and the draft a little later on, a consistent problem was quality because new workers lacked the skill necessary.

To counter this problem, they created the Training Within Industry program.  This program had 3 key components:  Job Relations, Job Instruction, and Job Methods.  Job relations taught leaders how to interact with employees.  Job instruction taught supervisors how to teach the work techniques to employees.  Job methods taught supervisors how to engage the employees in improving the way they did the work.

These were built on sound principles of educational psychology and were scripted so the teaching was consistent.  It was very effective.

After the war, we provided all the TWI documentation to Japanese industries as part of our reconstruction effort.  At home, companies were rehiring their former employees as they returned from the war.  Since they all knew the work before the war, the figured there wasn’t a real need to keep the program and so it faded into oblivion.

Japan, however, made good use of those materials and continues to use the methodology.  In the late 80’s, as manufacturers in the US were scrambling to learn all they could about Japanese Management Techniques, we rediscovered TWI and it has since become a movement of it’s own.  

I’ll talk about some details of the program in a couple of future episodes.  This week we’ll cover Kiichiro’s challenge to his manufacturing team, a period of labor unrest in the early 50s, some lessons from Deming and Juran, how Toyota weathered the oil crisis in 1973, and the growth of their business in the United States.

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102 - Quality

Good Morning.

Let's talk about quality today.  Producing quality products isn't something we've only recently focused on.

I suspect that since the first human carved something and traded it to someone else, quality has been an important part of work.  But Quality has a spotty history.

Back in Medieval Europe, craftsmen banded together to create guilds that would prescribe and enforce quality standards for a variety of products.  The guilds would conduct inspections and put some kind of mark on the product to indicate that it met their quality standards.

Many craftsmen recognized the value of a consistent string of quality marks and added their own mark to all of their products - yes, this is the birth of the Trademark.  Consumers could trust certain marks to consistently provide high quality goods.  For the most part, that hasn't changed.

But sometimes, we get a little mixed up.  As we evolved through factory age and the industrial revolution and supplying products to meet surges in demand, as in world war II, our focus frequently drifted from quality to quantity.  Guilds, factory managers, and government customers responded to this with a heavy emphasis on inspection. 

This legacy of inspection lingers and production planners today will build schedules to release more material than actually necessary so they can satisfy the day's demand despite a percentage of products failing inspection.  In other words, if they need to deliver 100 dishwashing machines today, they would release material and order the build of 125 because they know that some will fail inspection.  25% failure rates are extremely high and extremely rare, but this is happening everyday, at a tremendous cost.

Walter Shewhart introduced the world to the concept of process quality and process control.  The idea is that if you design an excellent process and keep it excellent and in control, it will consistently delivery the required quality.  This means you can build exactly what you need to deliver without the extras to cover failures.

The US relied heavily on this during world war II and began inspecting samples instead of everything.  This was necessary because we lacked enough skilled inspectors. We also put into place a Training Within Industry program designed to teach supervisors how to train people to keep the process in control, to do the required work properly and quickly, and to improve the processes and methods.

But at the end of the war, that all changed for us, but not for everyone.  I'll tell a couple of those stories in future episodes.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.