William Edwards Deming is an American statistician, professor and lecturer. He began to work in Japan after the World War II and influenced the further development of the country. Deming contributed not only into the development of one country, but in the development of management system all over the world. It was he who firstly implemented and described the principles of quality management. Thanks to his works, people all over the world nowadays are served on high quality level.
In my opinion, William Edwards Deming played one of the most significant roles in the development and implementation of the quality management. He was the first to outline the main principles of it. The most significant influence on the development of quality management had Deming’s famous fourteen points:
- Create a constant purpose toward empowerment;
- Adopt the new philosophy;
- Stop depending on inspections;
- Use a single supplier for any one item;
- Improve constantly and forever;
- Use training on the job;
- Implement leadership;
- Eliminate fear;
- Break down barriers between departments;
- Get rid of unclear slogans;
- Eliminate management by objectives;
- Remove barriers to pride of workmanship;
- Implement education and self improvement;
- Make “transformation” everyone’s job.
Before Deming broke into business world, there were unclear thoughts about quality and how it should be achieved. However, Deming explained that the better quality of a product is, the less expenses are; the better quality is, the higher is a company’s revenue. Besides, the point is that the fourteen points are not strict rules of how to achieve high quality; it is only tips helping managers understand what they ought to do.
There is no doubt, that all the points mentioned above are significant for managers as well as for ordinary workers. However, in my opinion, the thirteenth point is the most important on every company. Education of workers and their desire to self improve is the key point which will help make products better, increase its quality. Moreover, when an employee or a manager is well educated and knows much in one’s field of work, he or she will present new ideas of how to make work faster and better. In my opinion, it is significant to make employees involved in decision making process. This will surely motivate them and make work better. Besides, well educated employees will get better salaries. I think that trainings will not help much because usually managers, who do not always know what knowledge employees need, organize them. On the contrary, self improvement means that an employee will learn only materials he or she needs.
It has been already mentioned above that William Edwards Deming helped Japanese entrepreneurs change their old system and implement his ideas. This was one of the reasons of such fast development of technologies in Japan in the second half of the last century. Moreover, Deming’s ideas are implemented nowadays all over Japan and the entire world as well. Hence, to honor Deming’s memory, the Japanese top award for quality was named after the professor.
This essay was devoted to the Deming’s contribution into the quality management. It was shown that Deming played a significant role in its development. Moreover, he is honored even nowadays. The main achievement of Deming is that he changed the notion of quality and made a revolution in management.
Resources:
Deming’s 14 points on total quality management. N.d. Web. 07 Dec 2013
Dr. W. Edwards Deming. N.d. Web. 07 Dec 2013
