Demming's Fourteen Points example essay topic

Demming's Fourteen Points Demming's formulation of his Fourteen Points is seen by many as the management equivalent of the "10 Commandments". Like many quality driven approaches, the fourteen points take a holistic view of an organization, how it works, and its relationships with its stakeholders. Point 1: Create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive, to stay in business and to provide jobs. Constancy revolves around the customer. Success depends on how well a company eva lutes its processes, products and markets in order to understand future requirements.

This requires a commitment to invest and adapt to to changes in the market place. Point 2: Adapt new. Management must awake to new challenges, learn their and take on leadership for change. Quality means giving the customer what they expect. Business cannot afford mistakes. Mistakes of any type are costly, and reliable products reduce costs.

Demming 3 Point 3: Cease reliance on mass inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for mass inspection by building quality into the product in the first place. Dependency on inspection at key points in a process to ensure quality is too late, expensive and ineffective. Companies are paying workers to make mistakes and then correct them. Point 4: End the business of awarding business on the basis of price tags. Instead, min mize total cost.

Move toward a single supplier for any one item, based on a relationship of long term loyalty and trust. Price means nothing without a measure of the quality being delivered. When thinking about quality, the idea of buying from the lowest bidder gets abandoned. Point 5: Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service to improve quality and productivity, then thus decreasing costs.

The concept of quality should be built in at the design stage of the product. Each product should be viewed as "one of a kind" and there is only Demming 4 one chance of success. Point 6: Institute training on the job. Too often workers learn their skill from other workers who do not have adequate training. It is useful to train as many workers as possible to detract from costly mistakes.

Point 7: Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines to do a better job. Managers should be trainers, not policemen. Since management plays a key role in quality, reviews should include discussion on problems and potential solutions. Point 8: Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the good of the. Management through fear is destructive.

It impedes production and interferes with quality work. People cannot perform at their best unless they are secure and are not afraid to express their opinions. Point 9: Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design and production must work as a team to foresee problems of Demming 5 production and use that may be encountered with product or service. Breaking down barriers between staff is a matter of team work. Point 10: Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity.

Such exhortations only create antagonistic relationships because the bulk of the causes of low quality and production are a fault of the system and are often beyond the power f the work force. Because most causes of poor quality are systematic, the power to improve quality lies with the management, not the workers. Workers can do little to change the system, but management can. Point 11: Eliminate quotas on the factory floor, eliminate management by objective, and eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute leadership. The way to improve production is to improve the system and find out who is having problems and work with them to resolve the issues.

Point 12: Remove barriers that rob hourly workers of their right to pride in workmanship. The role of supervisors must be changed from Demming 6 monitoring numbers to creating quality. Managers do not understand the issue of pride in workmanship because they do not focus on the human process behind a product or service. Point 13: Institute a vigorous program of education and self improvement.

Although this similar to point six, the objective of this point is that education and improving the knowledge of the workers enables them to understand the impact of future challenges and to come up with their own solutions. Point 14: Put everybody in the organization to work to accomplish "quality". Quality is the job of everybody. Every job in an organisation is part of the production process, and to achieve the necessary transformation everyone must be committed to analyzing every step, because only by understanding the role of each job plays in the company's strategy can the production process be improved.