Automation

Work design, productivity, and automation

NUMMI reopened General Motors' troubled Fremont plant in 1984 with a workforce drawn largely from the people the old system had blamed, then achieved much higher productivity and quality under a different Toyota–GM–UAW work arrangement. The reversal shows that productivity belongs to a system of training, standards, flow, support, voice, and authority—not to a worker's character. It also preserves a dispute: participation and stop-the-line power can improve work while standardization, rotation, and lean staffing can intensify it.

When substantially the same people produce different results under a different system, what changed in method, authority, and burden?

W. Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming joined statistical reasoning about variation to a prescriptive philosophy of management. His wartime training, 1950 lectures in Japan, fourteen points, learning cycle, and System of Profound Knowledge are documented; their later use and effects must be separated from lone-guru histories and from claims that every program called total quality management implemented his ideas.