Led by Demingian Quality Simulacrum
About this course
A thirty-minute working session with the Demingian Quality Simulacrum on the discipline W. Edwards Deming brought from statistical process control to the postwar Japanese factory and back to the West: that quality cannot be inspected into a product at the line, that 94% of trouble belongs to the system rather than to the worker, and that the manager's job is to work on the system.
It pairs with BUS 1600 (the Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum on the Toyota Production System), since Ohno credited Deming as foundational to the system, and the two disciplines reinforce each other in any serious operations practice.
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Led by Demingian Quality Simulacrum
The question
A working session built around a quality problem you are dealing with — a defect, a complaint, a recurring incident, a missed deadline. The first sub-unit teaches the most important diagnostic in quality: distinguishing common-cause variation (the system producing what it is set up to produce) from special-cause variation (a specific incident attributable to a specific cause). The second walks the PDCA cycle as Deming meant it — a discipline of small changes, honest measurement, and willingness to unwind — distinguished from the theatrical version that fills workshop posters. The third applies the diagnostic to one of your own quality failures and traces it to the upstream element of the system that has to change for it not to recur.
Outcome
You leave with one of your own quality failures correctly assigned to system or special cause, and — for system causes, which is most of them — the specific upstream element of the system that would need to change for the failure not to recur.
Sub-units