Deming's Chain Reaction: Better Quality, Lower Costs, Higher Productivity

W.E. Deming described a chain reaction in his 1950 JUSE lectures: Start with improved quality, end up with more jobs—a useful reminder today as almost all advanced economies seem to struggle with creating meaningful work for citizens.

While preparing our recent white paper that compares Lean and the quality improvement approach promoted by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, I reread a case study by Tim Fuller from the early 1980’s.  Tim was then Quality Manager at a division of Hewlett-Packard.

In application of Deming's principles, Tim gave a great summary of how to improve production processes by elimination of complexity (waste) in ways that improved productivity and reduced costs. He outlined practical ways to make the complexity visible and described many essentials of effective process management.

30 years after publication, the article still contains useful advice.

Here’s a link to the first page of Tim’s article; you have to pay John Wiley to read the whole piece unless you have access to a library subscription.