As many commentators argue, had the Japanese simply followed the example of Western producers and sold goods which `merely satisfied' their customers, interest in emulating the use of methods they had used to such great effect might not have developed. The interest in TQM which initially occurred in the USA is ironical because, as those who examined Japan's apparent success quickly discovered, they had `simply' rigorously applied what Deming and Juran had taught them. There are many so-called quality gurus who emerged as a result of the need for organisations to radically improve, or risk getting beaten. Describing what these gurus recommend, whilst being interesting, tends not to add a great deal to the message that Deming and Juran taught to the Japanese in the
post-war period. What seems obvious, is that the Japanese learned that in order to improve, they must understand their own processes, look at howothers carry out similar processes and, using appro- priate measures, continually strive to implement more efficient methods of producing goods that achieve customer satisfaction.
However, as Crainer (1996) contends, the use of `hard' statistics must be applied in an organisational environment that is conducive to improvement. This leads to what is often described as the `soft' side of TQM. It is this soft side, the issues of howpeople are man- aged and the environment (culture) in which they carry out their day-to-day tasks, that has become the focus of many of what can be called the `contemporaries' of quality management (see McCabe, 1998). This focus occurred after the discovery that the application of systems similar to the one that Ford used at River Rouge was entirely misguided, most particularly in the way that measurement was being used to threaten and punish workers.
3.4.1 The move from inspection and quality control to quality assurance and TQM
Mass production systems such as the one that Henry Ford had instituted at the River Rouge plant certainly produced the desired result if units of production were the only measure. Crucially, the cars produced were cheap enough for most Americans to afford them. Unfortunately, as managers at factories like Ford were eventually to discover, the use of mass-production systems, because they rely on the need to keep producing high numbers without considering the wasted effort, are not only expensive, but ultimately, they alienate what Deming called the most important part of the production line: the customer.
Mass production was originally proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in his book The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor, 1911). Essentially, mass production requires simplification and standardisation. Thus, any person can, after some basic training, carry out any one step in the production process on a repetitive basis. However, in order to ensure that the end-product is actually correct in every way, a specialist inspector must be employed to carry out checks. This person will have specific responsibility for finding faults ± a task unlikely to endear him or her to the people who actually carry out the production. In order to remedy problems that they discover, inspectors frequently use what are called quality control techniques toforcethe workers to adopt practices that will
stop the recurrence of such faults. As those who have used mass- production techniques usually find in practice, the desire to rigor- ously enforce inspection and control methods not only alienates the workers but also it is usually unsuccessful in detecting faults before the customer receives the product. Thus, despite the cost of finding and fixing problems which may occur, the customer still receives something that is highly likely to fail in practice. As anyone who buys something that doesn't work properly will tell you, this causes considerable annoyance.
In order to attempt to allowworkers to exercise greater control over the task they carry out, quality assurance was developed.
Thus, rather than assuming the inspector will find faults in an item subsequent to its production, a system is implemented whereby the worker is made responsible for checking the quality of their own work. Thus, in order for the worker to show that they have indeed checked their own work, it is necessary for them to produce documented procedures (these will allow someone else to see that what is supposed to happen is indeed occurring). Such a system, usually referred to as a quality system, such as ISO 9000 (BSI, 1994), can provide the basis for considering methods to produce long-term improvement (a point that will be considered in more detail in Chapter 5). On the other hand, a criticism that is often levelled at the use of quality systems is that once they have been created, there is a reluctance to change them very often; the effort that is required to write a quality manual makes this a daunting task. The result, therefore, is that unless someone can find a good reason for not adhering to the procedure which governs his/her task, they are expected to comply ± regardless of whether or not the procedure actually ensures the customer gets what they want. In theory, the latter is remedied simply by rewriting the procedure(s): in practice, it is easier to do `what the procedure in the book says'. As British managers in the mid-to late 1980s found after attempting to use QA to produce improvement, their counterparts in the USA were coming to terms with the fact that the apparent success of Japanese industry had been based on simple concepts taught to them by Americans in the 1950s. Moreover, as they learned from considering the development of what was usually referred to as TQM, the most important thing to be done in order to improve was to allow the workers a greater say in how the production processes should be carried out to achieve customer satisfaction. The development of this thinking is summarised in Fig. 3.5.