the hardware they are building is good or bad (they're blindfolded as far as this information is

concerned, much the same way as you were when driving your car in the example above). After
these blindfolded operators build product, they give it to an inspector to determine if it is good or
bad (much the same as you relied on your fellow passenger for driving feedback, but with the added
restriction that you could only get feedback after leaving your lane or crashing into another car).
When considered in this light, is not relying on inspection an inefficient means of creating a quality
product? Would it not be better to take the blindfolds off of the operators, and allow them to see
where they are going in their desire to build a quality product? The answer to both questions, of
course, is yes. Statistical process control is the tool that removes operators' blindfolds, and in so
doing, moves organizations from a detection-oriented quality management philosophy to a
prevention-oriented philosophy. Industrial Revolution to the Information Age Many of us, when
faced with examples of poor quality, often hear comments such as "there's just no pride of
workmanship anymore." The implication of these sorts of comments is that quality deficiencies are
often due to workmanship, or operator errors. Modem quality management maintains that very few
nonconformances are due to worker error, but rather, most are due to defective manufacturing
processes, poor management systems, and poor product design. We agree totally with this concept.
Our experience in every company we've visited and our readings have convinced us that it is true.
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)