Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa was a pioneer in manufacturing quality assurance, and his principles are as valid today as they were in the 1950s.
Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, a Japanese engineer and quality control expert, is less well known in the West compared to legendary quality pioneers like Shewart, Juran and Deming. But his lifelong work to promote manufacturing quality was instrumental in launching the post WW2 Japanese manufacturing economy. He is most well-known for the development of quality circles, but his seven basic principles of quality are still the core of modern quality management. Jim Anderton describes the seven rules.
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Episode Transcript:
Ask most people about which Japanese people made important contributions to the modern world, and the answers typically include cultural figures such as actors, writers, athletes and the founders of large manufacturing companies such as Mitsubishi, Toyota, Sony and Honda.
As successful as these figures are, there is a much less well-known Japanese engineer who deserves to be remembered for seven simple principles that led Japanese industry from low-quality commodity producers of simple consumer goods like bicycles and umbrellas, to the high-technology powerhouse that we know today.
He was Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, a Japanese engineer and quality control expert. Manufacturing quality control had been known for decades in America, with pioneering work by those such as Shewart and Juran and Deming. But outside a few large American corporations, very little progress had been made since the 1930s until the postwar period.
Ishikawa changed this, and although he’s most famous for introducing the concept of quality circles, his seven fundamental principles are the foundation of modern manufacturing quality.
The first is customer focus. Ishikawa defined customer focus as the implementation of customer feedback in the product design, development and manufacturing process. It seems obvious today, but in the 1950s and 60s, it was not uncommon for even large manufacturing firms to use limited market research and even intuition to determine product attributes.
The second is continuous improvement. This seems so obvious that it’s almost trite, but Ishikawa defined the term to mean not simply better product quality, but more efficient production processes with less waste. The pioneering concept here was that more efficient and more tightly run production processes had the knock-on effect of improving product quality, something which was not immediately apparent in older systems which attempted to inspect quality into a product, then sent the defect information back into the production process.
The third is employee involvement. This is another one which seems obvious, but which ran counter to the original mass production concept of breaking complex tasks down into simple steps to allow unskilled or semiskilled labor to perform them. This is actually the heart of the quality circle.
The fourth is to conceptualize production flow from a process perspective, rather than as a sequence of individual tasks. This is harder to do than it looks, especially where multiple departments are involved in a production process. Each department is incentivized to act defensively when troubleshooting quality problems, rather than cooperatively. Ishikawa understood that this finger-pointing was fundamentally counterproductive.
The fifth is involvement of upper management. High-level management personnel were traditionally uninvolved in quality processes at large manufacturing firms. But Ishikawa noted that without buy-in at the front office, quality assurance systems would never be properly funded, nor would there be comprehensively implemented new production processes, when time is money.
The sixth is decision-making through data. It goes without saying that all decision-making in production processes is evidence-based, but that wasn’t always the case. Considerable bias is possible in measurement even today, and weeding out that bias can be surprisingly difficult. But without this, eventually data itself becomes a variable instead of an input into a function or set of differential equations on the road to in spec production.
The seventh and last is total supply chain commitment, which for Ishikawa meant supplier involvement in the quality process. In my experience in the automotive industry, the relationship between OEM customers and Tier 1 suppliers was adversarial at best, and price and delivery frequently trumped quality in contract negotiations. Ishikawa saw the flaw in this approach early, and his ideas resulted in Japanese manufactured goods developing global reputation for high quality and reliability.
Ishikawa died in 1989 at age 73, with multiple awards from the Japanese government and international quality organizations. His Fishbone diagram, or Ishikawa chart, is well known quality circles, but the interesting thing about the seven basic principles are that none of them are rooted in mathematics.
To perfect quality assurance, management structures come first, then the number crunching. And that’s the key takeaway for all modern manufacturing.
