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I’m a chemical engineer. The fundamentals of the chemical engineering profession were laid down 150 years ago by Osborne Reynolds. Although chemical engineering has seen many advances, such as digital process control and evolutionary process optimization, every engineer understands and uses Reynold’s work. Most people have heard of the Reynolds number, which plays a key role in calculating air and liquid fluid flows. There are no fads. Engineers use the fundamentals of the profession.
Fads, fads, fads
By contrast, in the past 70 years, “quality” has seen more than 20 fads. The fundamentals have been forgotten and corrupted. Quality has been lost. Quality managers engage in an endless pursuit of magic pudding that will fix all their problems.
Alarmingly, the latest “quality” fad, Agile, has nothing to do with quality. It’s a software development fad that evolved from James Martin’s rapid application development (RAD) fad of the 1980s. This in turn grew into the rapid iterative processing (RIP) fad. When it comes to quality today, anything will do, no matter how unrelated.
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Comments
Great article. Thanks!
Thank you, dear Anthony!
I want to believe that your persistence in explaining the value and sufficiency of the quality tools proposed by Shewhart, Deming, Ishikawa, and Wheeler will really enable people in companies to focus on quality.
KISS - Yes!
The problem is six-sigma is so engrained and forced onto Tier 1 by Ford and others. It's kinda like COVID-19; it won't go away.
It's a pity if it turns out
It's a pity if it turns out the way you think.
Excellent Article
Dear Dr. Burns,
An excellent article. It should be required reading for every quality practitioner and educator. Far too many "hacks" are out there selling unnecessary complexity, and causing chaos and continued problems as a result.
Dr. Wheeler and a few others have taught me a great deal over the years once I was introduced to their work. I was amazed by how much of what I once knew that just wasn't so!
Kind regards,
Steve
Quality Tools
The approach is somewhat right as every evolution in quality tools proved the applicable validity. It should be the user's decision how intellegently he or she is using it.
The method on how to help people better nderstand Deming is here
https://ur.booksc.eu/book/29439978/539fc5 by Dr. Paul Stepanovich
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