The Early 1900s
Let's start in the early 1900s when Henry Ford began the mass production of automobiles, the Ford Model T. Ford was inspired by the slaughterhouses in Chicago, where he observed the processing of the cow carcasses, and he decided to use this assembly line production, for his automobiles, with workers doing specialized tasks, using specialized tools and interchangeable parts. This allowed for the first time, well almost the first time, fast and cheap production of automobiles, propelling the before craft production of cars to a huge industry. Now, this is going on, but, we had important contributions to the quality movement from first, in the 1920s, we can mention Bell Laboratories. They've been working to improve the reliability of their transmission systems, and Dr. Shewhart developed at the time, the methods used today for statistical control charts. He applied these then at Western Electric, emphasizing the importance of reducing variation in manufacturing processes. Now, in England in the 1920s, Sir Ronald Fisher was working on improving agricultural yields, using designed experiments. And later, we had Dr. Taguchi, also working on the development of designed experiments for product and process engineering.
The 1940s and Further Development
In the 1940s, in World War II, we saw the use of statistical methods by the military in the U.S. for the production of goods and ammunition. And after the war, in the 1950s, there was a development of the science of reliability, which is why our products today last so long. But it really wasn't until after World War II that the more exciting quality concepts and movements appeared and moved towards consumer applications.
Toyota Connection in 1950
For example, in the 1950s, Edward Deming was a colleague of Dr. Shewhart, and he went to Japan as part of their post-war rebuilding efforts, and he brought Dr. Shewhart's ideas of process control to the Japanese industry, in particular to the automobile industry. We also had the publication of Dr. Joseph Durham's last quality control handbook in 1951, he was in charge of applying and just disseminating Bell Labs' statistical quality control innovations in Western Electric in the 1920s, and he, as we said before, was one of the people credited or the person credited, with bringing the human element of quality into the quality movement. But then, of course, we come to the famous Toyota Production System, which plays, of course, a huge role in quality management, and there are many interesting books dedicated to this, mentioning, for example, the original Toyota loom works, founded by Sakichi Toyoda, and how these automatic looms would halt, as soon as a thread broke, so defects would stop the line immediately, stopping all further production. The firm was then led later by his son, Kiichiro Toyoda, and he decided to move the production to automobiles after the war, and the firm struggling needed to work differently than their American counterparts. They realized they needed to reduce waste and be much, much more efficient, and have much higher quality. This developed the basis for what we call today lean manufacturing, and here yes, Edward Deming played an important role in this development, and we need to mention, of course, the engineer Taiichi Ohno, who's considered to be the father of the Toyota Production System, developing ideas such as the seven forms of waste, and just-in-time production. We also have the Ishikawa diagrams by Professor Ishikawa at the University of Tokyo, looking at causes and effect analysis, and while all these things are going on, the Japanese automobile industry surged to become a huge competitor to the big US automakers. Now, what was actually happening in the U.S., that's another interesting story.
Conclusion
Preconception was that quality means to test; it means additional resources used for testing, time used for testing. This is very costly, this reduces your throughput, cost manpower, and it's very reactive. Something has happened, and therefore, we either have to scrap, or we can maybe rework. But things have changed since then, and we're going to go through now the major milestones that have happened in the quality management movement since the 1900s. This was the rich history involved with the development of Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certification over the years.
