[HN Gopher] Statistical process control after W. Edwards Deming
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Statistical process control after W. Edwards Deming
Author : tosh
Score : 89 points
Date : 2022-11-27 19:27 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.2uo.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.2uo.de)
| akolbe wrote:
| Deming's quality management ideas (SPC specifically) were widely
| adopted in the US automotive industry by the 1980s and 1990s.
|
| Later on this entire field came to be known as Six Sigma, but
| Shewhart and Deming are still the bedrock underpinning much of
| it.
| key_stroker wrote:
| This is a cool write up, I think since his death people did not
| carry the legacy, and when I look at ai and machine learning it
| feels like the opposite of SPC.
|
| There's a podcast I listen to by the Deming institute, the
| presenters talk about his legacy and work and rarely about new
| applications or techniques. Feels like the world of data driven
| management is heading in the wrong direction.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Definitely! Shewhart and Deming are massively under-rated and I
| agree that today's measurement-obsessive culture is heading
| "Into the Crisis" not out of it.
|
| Every once in a while I read the 14 points , almost like a
| religious text to ask myself if I really do any of this, or
| have slipped "into sin". :)
| djur wrote:
| I've always been interested in Deming and his ideas (my dad was
| kind of obsessed with him when I was younger) and every time I
| want to find some good material on him to get other people
| interested I have trouble. A lot of the websites, books,
| videos, etc. out there are clearly sales vehicles for
| individual consultants, and when you get past that a lot of the
| remaining material has a kooky, almost cultlike quality. And
| almost invariably it feels very old, not in the sense of time-
| worn wisdom but in the sense of something that has been left
| behind. The vibe I get is less "let's pass this wisdom on to a
| new generation" and more "we were right the whole time, you
| should have listened to us".
| akolbe wrote:
| Certainly there was an entire cottage industry of well-paid
| consultants popularising these ideas around the 80s and 90s
| and yes, there was something distinctly cult-like about the
| scene and the Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt trainings
| that grew out of them.
|
| That's not the fault of the ideas though, many of which are
| just common sense.
|
| I was involved in the production of interactive video
| training courses on SPC and related topics in the late 1980s
| and early 1990s ... the first ones still used 12" laserdiscs;
| the DVD and the internet hadn't been invented yet. :))
| deterministic wrote:
| If you are interested in this you might also like the book "The
| Goal". It is a business novel introductions TOC (the Theory of
| Constraints) which IMHO is the #1 most efficient way to run a
| company/team/process/...
| kqr wrote:
| The problem with the theory of constraints is that it, from my
| understanding, uses inner constraints to determine boundary
| ingress rates. This causes higher variation than necessary.
| When a bottleneck is introduced, you will have a lot of crap
| backed up in front of it because you ran upstream processes at
| high rates into the bottleneck - even though you knew the
| bottleneck was there. When the bottleneck is lifted, you
| instead have upstream processes starved waiting for the flow
| from the boundary to come.
|
| A better alternative in the face of some variation is local
| signalling like kanban. This will run upstream processes at
| just the right rate all the way back to, and including,
| boundary ingresses.
| steppi wrote:
| This problem actually comes up in _The Goal_. After the
| characters lift the bottlenecks in their factory, things go
| smoothly for a while but then they start to see starvation in
| other areas like you mentioned. The solution they come up
| with involves local signaling and also data collection and
| analysis to understand the timeframes in play within the
| factory. The following excerpt is from Chapter 26.
|
| _Then I said, "Fine, but how do we time each release of
| material so it arrives at the bottleneck when it's needed?"
| Stacey said, "I'm not sure, but I see what you're worried
| about. We don't want the opposite problem of no work in front
| of the bottleneck." "Hell, we got at least a month before
| that happens, even if we released no more red tags from today
| on," said Bob. "But I know what you mean. If we idle the
| bottleneck, we lose throughput." "What we need," I said, "is
| some kind of signal to link the bottlenecks with the release-
| of-materials schedule." Then Ralph, to my surprise, spoke up
| and said "Excuse me, this is just a thought. But maybe we can
| predict when to release material by some kind of system based
| on the data we've kept on both the bottlenecks."_
| [deleted]
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| I'm so happy when people bring up the "...wtf" side of Deming, in
| context of his more useful contributions. Hero worship is
| bullshit. A person who has really great ideas also has really
| crap ideas, because nobody is perfect. We should be more
| comfortable humanizing people, so we don't get trapped in the
| cargo cult or appeal to authority, and so we can accept more
| ideas from people who don't look like geniuses.
|
| All that said: I find it so fascinating that his focus was on
| statistics and science, when so much of his advice is actually
| holistic observations from experience, and not all the result of
| scientific experiments or research. There is both a science and
| an art to making an organization (read: a group of people doing
| organized work) work well. You really need both, because people
| are, unfortunately, not science experiments, but weird blobs of
| meat and emotions interacting in an unfathomably complex system
| of systems of systems.
| dsr3 wrote:
| If I am interested in learning Deming ideas and theory, what is
| the textbook/book that I should read? Any recommendation?
| wsh wrote:
| For Deming's own ideas, such as the 14 Points, see his book
| _Out of the Crisis_ (1986), reprinted by MIT Press.
|
| For the practical application of control charts and other
| techniques (due originally to Shewhart and others), see the
| _Statistical Quality Control Handbook_ (Western Electric, 1958)
| or, for a more up-to-date treatment, the _NIST /SEMATCH
| e-Handbook of Statistical Methods_:
|
| https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/index.htm
| dsr3 wrote:
| Thank you, I am more interested about the latter
| (implementation of his techniques at industrial setting).
| Will check that soon.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| The Essential Deming[1] is probably the gold standard for now,
| though it can be a little dry. It's one of those "suggested
| readings" in basically any safety or process management higher
| education curricula.
|
| Not really 100% about Deming but very relevant, I would
| recommend Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" [2] as a
| supplement to understand some of the implications of what
| happens when Deming's ideas are implemented without
| understanding the human condition.
|
| Otherwise, Deming wrote and published plenty of his own work
| that is worth reading.
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Deming-Leadership-
| Principle...
|
| [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-
| Pr...
| zippyman55 wrote:
| I used SPC charts at work for analyzing ton (1000+) of different
| computer generated jobs that had to run daily. The SW was always
| under modification and the charts helped to catch the errors and
| Pareto charts helped drive home people needed to fix their stuff.
| I have to agree w one of the posters: " However, management did
| not like that I was using something so old" and this was always a
| struggle.
| zippyman55 wrote:
| I passed my copy on, but here is a nice 30 minute read where
| Tokyo waitresses were using the principles to sell sake.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Spc-Esquire-Club-Donald-Wheeler/dp/09...
| cardosof wrote:
| I've used Deming's ideas to optimize ads and it did work way
| better than bayesian ab testing or ML-based approaches. However,
| management did not like that I was using something so old, so I
| had to rebrand it, but it was Deming still.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| ISO 9001 and most of ISO 27001 are Deming through and through.
| If you tell some people you are going to use the principles of
| some old guy from the 1980s they laugh and dismiss you. Frame
| the same thing using some ISO numbers and throw in words like
| "compliance" and "best practice", and they go moist with glee.
| The shallow anti-intellectual fakery of some "management"
| sickens me.
| dataflow wrote:
| > ISO 9001 and most of ISO 27001 are Deming through and
| through.
|
| Huh, why am I reading the opposite here
| https://www.oxebridge.com/emma/how-does-
| iso-90012015-stack-u...?
|
| _ISO 9001 has never much embraced Deming, despite them
| saying so. In fact, most of the requirements of ISO 9001
| directly contradict Deming, as well as Juran, Crosby and
| other quality gurus._
| Zigurd wrote:
| I would explain it as a "no true Scotsman" thing. Deming
| has a very strong influence on the creation of ISO9000 and
| related standards, but it's like "manifesto Agile" people
| saying Scrum is heresy.
| maxerickson wrote:
| What does "Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new
| economic age. Western management must awaken to the
| challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on
| leadership for change." mean? Be precise.
|
| It can be possible that his points don't entirely express
| the useful aspects of his vision.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| The essence of both Deming's legacy and of ISO
| 9001/27001/45001 etc is "Plan, Do, Check, Act" which is
| rephrased a thousand ways but boils down to the same thing
| in the end. Figure out the current situation and decide
| what changes need to happen; implement the changes as best
| you can; document the results and evaluate them against
| expectations and past performance; re-evaluate needs based
| on evaluation results and repeat the cycle.
|
| To say that those ISO standards are in contradiction of the
| Deming cycle is surely just some PR attempt to pretend it
| was an original concept developed by highly specialized
| committees who absolutely need to be treated as experts,
| rather than common sense.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I find it extremely weird that "data science" as practiced in
| industry hasn't embraced statistical process control and
| operations research.
| tomrod wrote:
| Some areas have. The whole DS field is a bit of a minefield,
| mostly due to a "newer is better" view of the world stemming
| heavily reliance on bootcamps/eschewing fundamentals.
|
| May cooler heads prevail.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| Any chance of you doing a writeup on using Deming's idea to
| optimize ads? That would be a very interesting read as most ad
| optimization methods lack in intellectual rigor and controls.
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