“Just burning toast and scraping it”

In one of his 14 Points for Management, Deming called for mass inspection to cease. Prof. Henry Neave comments that this is not to suggest that we eradicate all inspection. He writes, ‘There is the world of difference between, on the one hand, dependence on inspection as an attempt to provide the customer with something that he won’t complain about and, on the other, the use of inspection to provide guidance toward improvement of a stable process as well as to pick up the occasional special cause that creeps unannounced into that otherwise stable system’. In an interview with Mary Walton (June 1985), Deming stressed that, ‘Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process’. In other words, we should seek to build quality in rather than inspect it out. Read more at www.glynlumley.co.uk