The Healthy Programmer

Continuous Improvement

In the early 1980s, the Ford Motor Company was struggling. It had losses totaling $3 billion, and much of its failure was due to the poor quality of the products it sold. One exception, however, was a line of cars containing transmissions assembled in Japan instead of the United States. Ford’s engineers disassembled several of these units and found that the consistency of the Japanese-built parts far exceeded even the tolerance levels defined in the assembly’s specifications. As a result, the Japanese cars ran more smoothly and had fewer failures than the same car models containing American-built transmissions.

The astonishing quality the Japanese factories delivered has been largely attributed to their use of a process ...