Carl F. Thelin

MANUFACTURING GURUS

In 1955, when I was a young engineer at General Motors Technical Center, I learned about these two people. Deming, the first one, was generally ignored in the US car makers. At about the same time Tahiti Ohno was successful in showing the Japanese how to beat the home-field advantages of the Detroit Big Three. Both of these pioneers emphasized that improving quality would eventually produce more sales. I don’t know if  they also said that improving the handling and crash safety would produce more sales would eventually produce more sales. 

William Edwards Deming – Manufacturing Guru (This material is from Wikipedia)

William Edwards Deming (1900 – 1993) was an American statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and consultant. Deming is widely credited with improving production in the United States during World War II, although he is perhaps best known for his work in Japan. There, from 1950 onward he taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing and sales (the last through global markets) through various methods, including the application of statistical methods.

Deming made a significant contribution to Japan's later reputation for innovative high-quality products and its economic power. He is regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage. Despite being considered something of a hero in Japan, he was only just beginning to win widespread recognition in the U.S. at the time of his death.

Tahiti Ohno – Manufacturing guru

Jul 3rd 2009 from Economist.com website

Tahiti Ohno (1912-1990) is not so much a guru but more a symbol of Japan’s manufacturing resurgence after the Second World War. Born in Dalian, in eastern China, he joined Toyota Automatic Loom Works between the wars. This was the first business of the Toyoda family until it was sold to a British company, Platt Brothers, and the family decided to invest the money that it had gained from the sale in manufacturing motor cars.

Ohno switched to work as a production engineer for Toyota, a car company, towards the end of the Second World War, at a time when its productivity was way below that of America’s mighty Detroit industry. Toyota’s boss decreed that it “must catch up with America within three years”. Or else.

Ohno decided there was no reason other than inefficiency and wastefulness why Toyota’s productivity should be any lower than that of Detroit. Hence he set out to eradicate inefficiency and eliminate waste in the part of the production process that he was responsible for. This became the core of the so-called Toyota Production System (TPS) that he and others subsequently developed between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s. Several elements of this system have become familiar in the West: for example, muda (the elimination of waste), jidoka (the injection of quality) and kanban (the tags used as part of a system of just-in-time stock control).

But it was not a smooth path. Ohno met regular resistance when he first set out to persuade the company to radically change its manufacturing processes. A big part of his story is about the power of Japanese persistence, of how he kept asking repeatedly why the company needed to (expensively) stockpile vast quantities of components for its production line—until eventually was born the just-in-time (JIT) method of stock control.

Ohno often described the TPS as being rather like a supermarket, which he had first seen (and been impressed by) on his trips to America to look at car production systems. In the TPS, each production process sets out its wares for the next process to choose from, just as a supermarket does. Thus production is “pulled” by the demand down the line rather than, as in previous assembly-line systems, being “pushed” by the production rate higher up the line.

The success of the TPS was helped to some extent by the fact that Toyota’s main factory in Japan is situated in Toyoda City, near Nagoya, where there is a classic “cluster” of car-industry suppliers and manufacturers. With its main suppliers never more than a few miles away, it was easy for Toyota to choose parts on demand and ensure that they arrived at its doors precisely as and when it needed them. With more far-flung manufacturing networks, it is obviously harder to apply JIT.

Ohno’s fame was spread to some extent by the telling of his story in books and articles translated into English. For example, in “The Mind of the Strategist”, an influential and early insight into Japanese strategic thinking written by Kenichi Ohmae, Ohno is cited as a great example of his country’s perseverance. “If instead of accepting the first answer, one … persists [like Ohno] in asking ‘Why?’ four or five times in succession,” wrote Ohmae, “one will certainly get to the guts of the issue, where fundamental bottlenecks and problems lie.”

Notable publications

“Workplace Management”, Productivity Press, 1982

With Mito, S., “Just in Time for Today and Tomorrow”, Productivity Press, 1988