How - Dov Seidman [114]
FIGURE IV.1 The Production Triangle
Each point of the triangle represented either fast, cheap, or good. The idea was that you could pick two: You could have it good and fast, but it wouldn’t be cheap; good and cheap, but it wouldn’t be fast; or fast and cheap, but it wouldn’t be good. The trap lay in the fact that quality was generally considered an end-of-the-line inspection point. Widgets would roll off the line, and someone standing at the end would inspect them for quality and throw the bad ones away. If there were 20 steps in the manufacturing process, quality was step 21; steps 1 to 20 didn’t concern themselves with quality. Businesses could deliver high-quality products, but it was more costly to do so because it meant throwing away more products at the end of the line. More profoundly, businesses generally viewed quality as an aesthetic, a soft, amorphous characteristic that couldn’t be easily quantified or measured. People thought, “I know good quality when I see it; but it’s subjective.” We did not have a common vernacular for it; good was in the eye of the beholder.
The Japanese came along and stood those concepts on their ear. They realized that quality defects were in fact inefficiencies, and by shifting the idea of quality from the back of the line to the front, they could create a process that manufactured high-quality products far more efficiently and economically. They did this initially by decentralizing the responsibility for quality from the top of the production pyramid, like auto assemblers Toyota and Mitsubishi, to their subassemblers, and then took the savings they accrued and invested in close collaborations with these subassemblers to improve quality in the production lines. Suddenly, they were able to deliver a high-quality product quickly at far less cost, giving the rest of the world a very loud wake-up call. They started winning, with quality as a key differentiator.1
Global business raced to catch up. Ford Motor Company proclaimed quality “Job #1.”2 Titans like General Electric embraced the process reengineering concepts of Total Quality Management (TQM) and six sigma to drastically reshape the focus of their corporate cultures. 3 Quality was no longer a vertical silo, the responsibility of some deputized quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) person at the end of the line; it became the responsibility of every employee at every level of every task. Power shifted from the top of the hierarchy down to its base; anyone, at any stage of the process, could stop the line if they found quality compromised. By designing in quality at every stage of a business process, enterprises of all types were able to wring inefficiencies from their systems and greatly improve productivity.
The quality movement freed Western businesses from the tyranny of the production triangle and overcame the inverse relationship of cost/quality/time. Suddenly, a company could deliver all three: fast, cheap, and good. The best companies today do this every day because that is what it now takes to compete and to win. A Dell computer is not just cheaper; it is just as good as the expensive ones that IBM used to make. Southwest Airlines flies the same routes, under the same regulatory constraints and the same cost pressures as the majors, but found a better way to navigate through a difficult market. Southwest turns around planes faster, makes them perform more reliably, and delivers a high-quality service at a low price.
How did business do it? How did it take this aesthetic, quality, and turn it into a measurable process? First, it sat back and tried to gain some systematic understanding. What are the factors that influence quality? It developed deep knowledge around the forces and dynamics that correlate and cause quality to happen or not happen, and it developed a language in which to frame these thoughts. Armed with that understanding, it began to design, measure, and manage quality as a business process. It broke down the walls surrounding the QA/QC department at the end of the line