Before continuing with the analysis of Deming's 14 points. I consider it necessary to place the readers in the context of Dr. Deming's philosophy for business administration, the following example presents the case of two directors of a transport company, the first of them with the traditional western form and another which follows the path recommended by Dr. Deming. These examples were written by Myron Tribes and I rescue it for its great topicality despite the fact that it was written in 1989, which indicates that most companies or directors did not understand the Deming Way and continue to put out fires in their companies (if they still exist).
What is the Deming Way?
Suppose a carrier company (cargo trucks), managed by an individual involved in the management methods normally taught in our business management schools. He sees it as his job to run the company as profitably as possible and expand business. To carry out this, he relies on the best consultants he can have, to help him design and implement the best possible system. They set rules and regulations for drivers and all personnel, and instruct computer-based procedures so that personnel are under control. He will study your markets and the opportunities that arise. You will keep extensive records of income and expenses, to always be alert to opportunities that allow you to generate profits.
Of course, he will not be able to do all this alone, and as his organization grows, he will institute methods to see that his desires for efficiency and execution are carried forward. Most likely, he will implement objective management and teach it to his subordinates. You can assign up to five people from your workforce to collect data and monitor execution, always on the lookout for possible profit opportunities.
In summary, his idea of good administration is a conception that is oriented towards him, that establishes a system, directs work through his subordinates and through filing and clarifying tasks, develops a basis for setting standards of action for your employees. Set production goals and objectives for your team. It rates employees as objectively as it can, sometimes calling advisers to assist them in this task. It identifies those with the lowest performance and provides them with training, so that they meet the work standards or simply replace them (the latter is more common than the former). Consequently, he hopes to create the most efficient system possible.
Compare this to the behavior of a manager who follows the Deming Path. This manager sees his work as something that requires him to be endowed with consistency and continuity of purposes for his organization and to find even more effective ways to achieve his purpose. For him, obtaining utility is something necessary for survival, but it is not, in any way, the main purpose of his organization. His vision of the organization's purpose is to provide its clients with the best transportation system at the lowest possible cost and to maintain the continuity of the work source. It does not consider that the concepts of "best" and "lowest possible cost" are contradictory.
You will consider that it and its workers have a natural division of labor. They are all responsible for performing or carrying out work within the system, and he is responsible for improving the system. However, he realizes that the potential to improve the system is something that never ends, for that reason, he does not request advisers to teach him how to redesign the "best" system, because he knows that this does not exist, he knows that any system can be continually improved. He realizes that the only ones who really know where the possibilities for improvement lie are the workers themselves.
You know that the system is subject to great variability, traffic conditions are changing, trucks are malfunctioning, docks are not always available to unload or receive items, errors are made regarding the route or the sender. There are a myriad of ways in which or through which the system goes wrong, or falls out of control, diminishing quality and increasing cost. You know that occasionally this happens.
For him and his workers to work together, he knows that they must consider the system and use language that is common to him and to them. For this reason he learns elements of statistics, and he teaches them to his workers, and he makes an expert in statistics, if necessary, intervene, to help him and the workers, when they present a problem that is beyond their control. scope of elementary statistics.
All of its employees learn to keep their own statistics. Drivers record how long they had to wait at the docks, and study the circumstances inherent in each event. They make their own control charts, and interpret the data, looking for trends, correlations, and other events of event judgment, which are normally out of control. Drivers meet with other drivers and sometimes with the dispatcher, and compare notes. They maintain quantified information about the way their units behave, discuss their charts with the purchasing agent and with each other.
Based on such data, the manager, who is responsible for the system, makes changes, and the workers, based on their statistical information, help him realize how effective the changes have been. When the manager instructs the purchasing manager to buy on a “quality” basis, not just on a cost basis, the purchasing agent has the information, provided by the drivers, with whom to achieve what they request, and has information to show that he has.
Occasionally you will ask for volunteers from your own work source to interview clients and vendors in order to understand what they want, or what can be provided, or can be provided for offer them a better service. These volunteers later inform him and the rest of the workers, which was what they found, analyzing based on statistics.
In short, the manager using the Deming Path will have a natural basis for team building and will not introduce contradictory relationships.
Under management methods, which are normally taught, it is assumed that the boss-worker relationship has inherent adverse aspects. The result is that managers who want to agree with the consecrated image must be very careful in developing a good relationship with the worker, unless they lose their objectivity in judging and rewarding performance. (Remember the restrictions that are given to officers in the militia, prohibiting them from interacting with the personnel under their command. That is possibly a good idea for a system where nobody is supposed to propose improvements!). On the Deming Trail, the boss and worker naturally collaborate together.
Consequently, the Deming Way is about more than paying attention to quality control, it is an administrative philosophy to achieve lower costs and higher quality. And it works not only in the industry, but also in educational institutions, hospitals, service companies and even in offices.
