Chris Kueny wrote: > Somebody who knows more than me should point out the difference in Japanese > QC vs German QC. The Germans accept a certain amount of bad cars, and try > like heck to catch them and fix them before shipping them, while the > Japanese see any bad car as a problem in the process, and find a way to fix > the process so that problem just doesn't happen anymore. Have I got that > right? >
I'm not sure about Japanese vs. German, but the Japanese were much quicker to pick up on statistical process control methods than Americans were. To put it very simply, if you imagine the specifications a product has to meet as two vertical lines on a graph, and the actual values of products coming off the line as a bell curve, American companies would focus on finding the finished items that were in the "tails" outside the specs and reworking them to make them good; while Japanese companies would focus on refining the process to narrow the curve so the "tails" were smaller and more of the finished product landed inside the specs to begin with. This is the basis of statistical process control...you measure and graph things so you know where your actual output is compared to the specs. Is the average too high or too low? Is there too much variation? This has to be applied to the whole manufacturing process, from gaskets and bolts on up. W. Edwards Deming was a big advocate of statistical process control. He had very limited success convincing American companies to change how they did business, but after WWII he traveled to Japan. People there listened, and the rest is history.
