Is Quality an Issue Again?

 

Part 1:  My Background in Quality Management

My career was heavily rooted in Quality and Reliability beginning with my first real job at Ford Motor Company.  In 1976, I started working in the Warranty and Reliabiliity Department of the Body and Electrical Products Engineering division.  My job was to track the one and three month in-service warranty incident rates on several subsystems across all cars and light trucks.  I did rudimentary forecasting by month on these two data sets to upward trends before they become too costly. 

It was a fun and interesting time to work in the auto industry.  It was becoming clear that the Japanese cars were better than ours in some significant ways.  They cost less.  There outer dimensions of their vehicles were smaller than our comparable models but, remarkably, their interior dimensions and cargo dimensions were larger.  They had better fuel economy.  Lastly, their cars had significantly lower defects and higher reliability than ours.  To top it all off, the Japanese, primarily Toyota and Honda, could crank out new models in about two years versus four years for ours. 

It was a crazy time and the management of the Detroit Big Three keep trying harder to do things the way they were used to doing.  Henry Ford himself was fond of saying, “If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got”  The company that he founded had forgotten that bit of wisdom. 

D-day came on June 24, 1980 when NBC aired a segment of their acclaimed documentary series NBC White Paper.  The show that night was called If Japan Can… Why Can’t We?   The gist of the report was that the Japanese was that the Japanese were used methods developed in the US, that we had essentially forgotten about and barely used anymore, to achieve the better designed and higher quality products taking market share away from the US auto makers.  The report hosted by NBC newsman Lloyd Dobbins, introduced us to an American man who, W. Edwards Deming who given much of the credit for teaching the Japanese about Quality Management. 

The next day, everyone at Ford Motor was discussing the show and this fellow Deming that no one had ever heard of.  Ford bought hundreds of copies of the show on and had every department watch it.   Within a few days, Deming, then 80 years old, was at the Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn, MI lecturing the top executives in the company.  With a month, I was at a session in an auditorium at the headquarters listening to a lecture by Deming.  I went because someone in our department had to go but no one else wanted to go.  It was decided to “send the kid.”  I was the kid. 

I had no clue of what Deming was talk about, but it changed the course of my career.  Soon, Quality become Job 1 at Ford and for me as well.  I was looking for another Master’s degree.  By all logic, I should have enrolled in an MBA program but I wanted something more technical.  I stumbled upon an ad for the masters in Operations Research, the science of informed decision making, at Wayne State University.  Two of the primary professors Leonard Lamberson and Kailash Kapur had written the best book of that era on Reliability Engineering and the program included courses on Quality Management.  It was perfect.  While at Wayne, I took a classes from the Math Department on Probability and Statistics to really learn both subjects.  I ended getting an MS in Operations Reserch/Industrial Engineering and an MA in Statistics.  My career was set.  I was part of the Quality Revolution in the US. 

Over the years the auto industry closed the gap with the Japanese though I still believe Toyota and Honda have an edge.  At the beginning defect rates were measure in defects per hundreds in a subsystem to now being measure in defects per million.  I worked on product quality in the auto industry at Ford, Rockwell Automotive, and TRW.  I then moved to the fast moving Consumer Packaged Goods industry and work at Colgate-Palmolive where order fulfillment quality was their biggest issue.  I helped lead an effort that took Colgate from worst in class to best-in-class in Latin America.  

I moved to Supply Chain Management for the tail end of my corporate career but in every job thereafter include my current as a professor at North Park University, I focus my work through the lens of Quality Management, Process Improvement, sound metrics, and team building. It works and the results and legacy speak for themselves.