Most quality deficiencies are not due to workmanship errors.
But let's turn back to the "no pride of
workmanship" train of thought. Where did it originate? Early in our nation's history, most items were individually made by craftsmen. A chair, for example, would be produced by a single individual, who built the item from raw lumber and turned it into a finished product. Clothes were produced the same way. So were guns, wagons, and virtually every manufactured product. Techniques of mass production had not yet arrived, so a single individual did in fact have responsibility for building an item from start to finish. Any mistakes in its fabrication were exclusively his or hers. Individuals recognized this, frequently took great care in creating an item, and did indeed have "pride of workmanship." Pride of workmanship notwithstanding, there were major problems with the above approach. One was that the process of creating an item took a great deal of time. Because of that, items tended to be more expensive than they had to be. Yet another problem was that when an item broke, especially if it happened to be something as complex as, say, a gun, getting it repaired was strictly a custom proposition. One could not simply buy a replacement part and drop it in. That's because of the "craftsmanship" involved in individually hand fitting each piece. Mass Production Emerges The industrial revolution, about which we'll say more in a minute, largely began in the mid to late 1800s. Even before that time, Eli Whitney (inventor of the cotton gin) recognized that in order to meet the needs of the emerging American mass market one needed an efficient manufacturing process that could produce identical items in large quantities at a reasonable cost. In the late 1700s, Whitney believed that if he could standardize component dimensions for the parts used in complex mechanisms, he could achieve the goal of parts interchangeability, and build items in mass production. Whitney reasoned that if he could produce large numbers of each of the components used in a complex mechanism (and make all of them identical), then workers could simply assemble the parts to create the complex mechanism. Whitney sold his idea to the United States government when he accepted a contract to build 10,000 rifles for the Army using this concept of mass production and parts interchangeability. The idea was sound, but it was too far ahead of its time. Whitney began the contract by making enough parts for the first 700 rifles. With 700 complete sets of parts, Whitney found (much to everyone's dismay) that he could only assemble 14 rifles. What went wrong? Using the manufacturing processes of the era, the various rifle parts could not be made such that they were identical to each other, and therefore, they were not completely interchangeable. The concept of component 90 Quality Mana~,ement for the Technology, Sector interchangeability was sound, but the engineering of component tolerances and the ability to hold the tolerances necessary to achieve interchangeability had not yet arrived. The parts had too much variability. Scientific Management Whitney's concept of mass production did not get off the ground until the later 1800s (after the U.S. Civil War), when the industrial revolution began in earnest. Frederick Taylor, regarded as the father of modem industrial management, put forth the notion of scientific management of work. Scientific management gained great favor in the United States and Europe. Taylor's work emphasized the division of labor, much the same as had Whitney's earlier ideas. Taylor recognized the economies of scale associated with dividing the tasks necessary to make a finished product and apportioning these tasks amongst the workers in an organized factory. Unlike his predecessors, however, Taylor also recognized that this new concept of division of labor brought with it new burdens. One was the absence of the craftsman-like approach in which a single worker takes a product from raw material to finished item, and its inherent pride of workmanship. Taylor saw that division of labor necessarily created dull and repetitive tasks for factory workers, and that methods of motivating workers to maintain high output would be necessary. This fact notwithstanding, Taylor seized upon time and quantity as the fundamental standards for measuring worker output in this new environment. Worker adequacy would be judged by ability to meet a specified production quota. Although there are many advantages associated with scientific management of work (the philosophy is often referred to as Taylorism), there are also significant disadvantages. Taylorism introduced two concepts that work against quality. The first detractor is the division of labor concept. In addition to dividing the tasks required to produce a finished item, Taylorism frequently resulted in separate inspection functions. For the first time in American industry, people responsible for performing a task were no longer responsible for the quality of the task they performed. Someone else worried about that (these people became known as inspectors, and the organizations to which they belonged became known as quality control). The second Taylor- induced shortfall was judging peoples' output solely on rate. How well an item met requirements no longer mattered. How many were produced per hour did. Taylorism rapidly gained an intrenchable foothold in this country and other industrializing nations. Even today much of our manufacturing management philosophies are dominated by concepts firmly rooted in Taylorism (if you doubt this, try to find a factory that doesn't rely on manufacturing standards or specified time periods to produce an item)