I heard this story in (Juran) Quality Training in 1985. It was presented as a true story that happened in the 1948-1950 timeframe.
The setting was post-war Japan in a textile mill that spun yarn and thread and knit them into consumer products. The United States paid for automated equipment to lift Japan's economy out of the basement. The equipment was not placed in a purpose-built building but was shoe-horned into a multistory factory.
The problem was that every so often, a skein or spool would come into a station that fed into one of the automated looms and loom would lock-up into a giant rat's nest that took an hour to disassemble and clear out.
The problem was traced back to an operator on a lower floor who removed skeins from a winder and placed them on spindles on a roller-rack. When the rack was full she had a minute to stretch her back before the next rack replaced it.
She was not using the knot that she had been trained to use because she had found a quicker, "better" way to knot them. When the loom operator tied the tag-end of one of her skeins onto the tag of the skein that was almost used up, it did not untie the knot but, instead, resulted in the entire hank being gobbled up by the machine in one big chunk.
Rather than summarily firing the operator, the Quality Manager waited for the next train-wreck and then he directed the repairmen to not touch the machine until he returned.
He plucked the prideful worker out of her downstairs job and escorted her up to the behemoth (compared to the stature of a typical Japanese woman of the time) loom and then directed the repairmen to begin.
She knew that they knew that she was the cause of the problem. The entire factory ground to a halt as material backed up behind the loom. An hour later, they were able to restart the loom at low speed and it took another hour before the loom's timing was dialed in enough that they could run at full speed.
The woman burst into tears "I had no idea!" she gasped, sure that she was about to be fired.
The Quality Manager shook his head "No".
"Go back to your department and tell them that the roller-rack is not your customer. Everybody down-line of your station is. The rack, the shunter (who moved the racks from one floor to the next), the loom operator, the repairmen, the store that buys our sweaters and even the customer who ultimately purchases our products."
"Tell them to follow their written instructions exactly they way they are trained...even if it seems stupid or like it is make-work."
One of the more fruitful lessons gleaned from some corporate consultant was to view your co-workers as customers. You work hard to satisfy your customers 100%.
ReplyDeleteI learned a little about the Japanese mentality in college. One saying I have engraved on my palms: Fix the problem, not the blame. It works as it gives respect (face) and the result is I got respect from all my internal and external customers. It put us on the same side.
ReplyDeleteI used to tell my maintenance guys similar: Production is your customer, not your enemy. Hard to remember sometimes.
ReplyDeleteJuran wrote the quality book I've consulted most over the decades. His, and the other stories and principles of quality management and control that influenced the Japanese reindustrialization are the bases for most of the US practices. Seems like it should have been more widely taught in engineering school - I had to get it at an employer years later. (Producing Pareto diagrams on a mainframe using a line-editor for input was painful, and one of those funny twists that demonstrated that even the implementation of the principles sometimes missed the forest for the trees.)
ReplyDeleteIf only the judges in Blue cities considered the people who were exposed to future violence from the criminals they released to be their customers. If only...
ReplyDeleteThis is the best inference to draw from the story today. Every time a judge lets a violent criminal go to kill, rape or maim a citizen, let's make that judge go to the morgue or hospital, and then go explain it personally to the victim's family.
DeleteDoes anyone have experience with Dr. Deming's Total Quality Management?
ReplyDeleteLong ago, with a utility that won a Deming award.
DeleteSo if one rigidly adheres to the standard, how is there improvement to a process? Most of our improvements came bottom up, not top down.
ReplyDelete