Questions for senior management from Edwards Deming to conduct an independent audit of their companies

Source: [2] - W. Edwards Deming, “Out of the Crisis: A New Paradigm for Managing People, Systems and Processes” / “Out of the Crisis”, W. Edwards Deming - M.: Alpina Publisher, 2017. Scientific editors Yu. Rubanik, Y. Adler, V. Shper. You can purchase the book from the publisher Alpina Publisher

Free access to articles does not in any way diminish the value of the materials contained in them.

Company goal and readiness for change

1. Has your company established for itself constancy of purpose ?
2. If so, what is that purpose? If not, what prevents this?
3. Does the established goal remain the same or does it change as each company president comes and goes?
4. Is everyone in your company aware of this established ongoing goal once you have stated it?
5. How many people does believing in it help them work better?
6. Where would you like to see your business in five years?
7. How are you going to achieve these goals? By what method?
8. How will you know that your process or system is stable ?
9. If they are stable, who is primarily responsible for further improvement?
10. Why, under these circumstances, is it useless to ask the shop manager, service heads, department heads, and workers to improve quality?
11. And if they are unstable, then what changes?
12. How will your attempts to make improvements differ in both cases?
13. Have you created teams to work on each of the 14 points , as well as to combat deadly diseases of management and obstacles to change ?
14. How are you doing with 14th point ?
15. Is absenteeism a stable phenomenon in your company?
16. What about layoffs?
17. What is the situation with injuries at work? Stable phenomenon?
18. If all this is present, then who is responsible for the improvement? (Answer: management).
19. Why management transformation important for survival ?
20. Has the company formed a critical mass of people committed to change?
21. Why is this critical mass needed?
22. Do all levels of management share new philosophy ?
23. Can they all generate ideas? Do they do this?

If you work in a service organization

1. What percentage of people in your company know what products you make and what services these products provide?
2. Does every employee know that he has a customer?
3. How do you define quality? How do you measure it?
4. Are your services better than they were a year ago? Why? How do you know this?
5. (If yes.) Why did this happen?
6. Are you serving your consumers better than you were two years ago?
7. How is it shown?
8. What have you done to try to improve service?

Teamwork

1. What have you done to improve teamwork between:
   1. designers and manufacturers of goods (or services);
   2. designers and sellers of goods (or services);
   3. designers and purchasers of goods (or services)?
2. What do you do to ensure that procurement, production and sales work as one team?
3. What are you doing to bridge the gap between design of a product or service and actual production and delivery ? In other words, what are you doing to improve the testing of your products or services before you manufacture and ship them?

Improving quality

1. What measures are you taking to improve quality:
   1. input materials for production;
   2. tools, machines, auxiliary equipment;
   3. internal information exchange?
2. What are you doing to ensure that quality and productivity concerns everyone, including management?
3. Are you aware of losses that occur due to defective items or products, or due to error at any point in the production line?
4. What are you doing to ensure the quality you expect to offer your customers in four years?

Procurement and cost

1. If you have sole supplier for one material or product, can you call your relationship with it long-term and loyal?
2. Does your purchasing department strive to win contracts at the lowest prices?
3. If so, why?
4. How much does this policy cost you?
5. Is the full cost of using these materials taken into account?
6. How?
7. Do you have more than one supplier for the materials and components you regularly buy?
8. (If yes.) Why is this so?
9. What is your supplier reduction program?
10. How many suppliers do you have for the four most important purchased products that you use on a regular basis, including commodities and transportation?
11. How many suppliers do you have for each of these products:
    1. Now;
    2. a year ago;
    3. two years ago;
    4. three years ago?
12. What is your program for developing long-term relationships of loyalty and trust with suppliers (including commodities and transportation)?
13. What about equipment? How many suppliers do you have for each type of procurement?
14. If more than one, why?
15. What steps are you taking to reduce their number?

Work with providers

1. How much of the material entering the production line is used by the shop manager for lack of a better option (with inevitable material waste, or rework, or both)? Try to answer the given question for two or three production lines.
2. How often do you come across examples like the following:
   1. materials comply with specifications, but are not suitable for the production process or do not meet the requirements for the final product;
   2. Incoming inspection was recognized as necessary, but due to an acute shortage of material on the production line, it was carried out in a hurry, in a shortened version, or not carried out at all?
3. How much input material is rejected by production managers and returned to the supplier? Answer this question for only two or three important product lines.
4. What processes do you use to log and resolve these issues?
5. What agreements have you made with suppliers to provide evidence of statistical controllability of product quality characteristics that allow you to safely refuse inspections?
6. What kind of work are you doing with your suppliers to make sure that you're talking about the same centimeter, the same test? See article about operational definitions .

Selective control methods

1. You continue to use military standard 105D or Dodge-Romig plans (or their analogues of sampling control in GOST R - Approx. S. Grigoryev) when selling or purchasing materials?
2. Why?

Certification

1. Do you hold an annual manager certification ?
2. If so, what are you doing to replace this system with a better one?

Processes

1. Does your training and retraining system for any operation take into account the requirements of the next operation?
2. What percentage of your workers understand and accept the job requirements of the next operation?
3. Why don't all people understand the essence of the following operations?
4. How can you estimate the cost of mistakes made by those who do not understand the demands placed on them by the next operation?
5. How much of your costs are due to defects that occurred in previous operations? This is one of those quantities that are quantitatively unknown and unknowable - deadly disease number 5 .

Numerical goals

1. Do you run a company based solely on available numbers ?
2. If so, why?
3. What steps is your management taking to understand the importance of unknown and unknowable numbers?
4. do you use number management method (is the person required to increase productivity, or increase sales by a certain number of units, or reduce waste, or staff, or costs by a certain amount, for example, by 6%)?
5. Are you guilty of setting quantitative goals in the production of products, incl. rationing ?
6. What is your program for getting rid of quantitative standards (indicators determined by direct counting: number of pieces, daily output, etc.) and replacing them with knowledge and leadership?
7. If so, what is this management style costing you?
8. Do you understand the fallacy of this practice?
9. Show that numbers imposed from above are linked to other numbers like gear teeth .
10. Don't you think that the numbers imposed from above are adjusted out of fear of not meeting the requirements, and nothing else.
11. Are you replacing supervision with leadership in at least some parts of your company?

Criteria for assessing employee performance

1. By what criteria do you select artists? In other words, how did your workers become masters?
2. What do your craftsmen know about this work?
3. Do they know how to determine that someone needs personal assistance because doesn't fit into the system?
4. Do they know how to figure out who is performing above the system's capabilities?
5. What are your plans to eradicate:
   1. piecework ;
   2. individual bonuses?
6. Will the practice of sending management letters of gratitude to those managers who performed above average in the past month improve the moral climate in the company?
7. How do you know who deserves a promotion?
8. How will you know who needs specific help or advice?
9. What do you think about writing to people who performed below average last month?
10. What are your plans and what are you currently doing to remove obstacles that are hindering workers? be proud of your skill ?

Slogans

1. Do you tape the walls? posters with goals and appeals ?
2. If so, what are you doing to replace them with information about your management's efforts to remove barriers that prevent workers from taking pride in their workmanship?

Paper work

1. What are you doing to reduce paperwork?
2. What steps are you taking to reduce the number of signatures required on travel documents, supplier invoices, etc.?
3. What steps do you take to immediately reimburse an employee for travel expenses?
4. What expenses did you incur last year due to paperwork errors?

Engineering developments

1. Does your management know what the costs of engineering improvements are?
2. What is the reason for project modifications?
3. Do your engineers have enough time to do their jobs correctly in the first place?
4. How are they ranked?
5. Do you see other problems with the engineering ranking system you use?
6. If so, what do you plan to do about it?

Development of new products studying customer needs

1. What is your new product or service development program?
2. How do you plan to test your new developments or test ideas?
3. What do you know about the problems that consumers of your products have?
4. How do you control the properties of your products during use?
5. How do consumers evaluate your products (services) in comparison with those of your competitors?
6. What source of information do you use?
7. What data do you have?
8. Why do they buy from you?
9. On what basis do you believe this?
10. What data do you have?
11. What are the problems or shortcomings of your products from a consumer perspective? On what basis do you believe this?
12. What data do you have?
13. What problems or disadvantages do your competitors' products have from a consumer perspective?
14. On what basis do you believe this?
15. What data do you have?
16. Will your current customers still be loyal to you a year from now?
17. And in two?
18. Do your consumers believe that your products meet their expectations?
19. What expectations do your advertising and your salespeople set? Bigger than you can justify?
20. From what source do you learn about this?
21. (If applicable.) Is your customer satisfied with the service you or your dealer provide?
• If so, what exactly is in their best interest?
• Quality of work?
• Waiting time for a service agent?
• Name the source from which you learned about this.

Understanding quality from your and the consumer's perspective

1. How you spend difference between presentation about the quality of your consumer and the representation of the factory manager and workers?
2. Are your customers' perceptions of the quality of your products consistent with the quality you intend to provide them?
3. Do consumer complaints have to occur for you to know what's wrong with your product or service?
4. Do you rely on warranty cost data to evaluate your products and services?
5. Why are customers leaving you?
6. What can bring you profit? (In relation to regular consumers.)
7. What do you need to do to retain customers?
8. Who decides whether people will buy your products?
9. What new design will be in demand in four years?

Compliance checks

1. What kind of testing or verification do you do (don't try to answer this question for every product you have, just focus on three or four important samples or three or four production lines):
   1. for input materials;
   2. in progress;
   3. for finished products?
2. How reliable is your verification at each of these points? How do you know this?
3. What data can you confirm that your Do controllers work in harmony?
4. What can you say about control devices, or more precisely, about their use? Can you provide evidence of the statistical controllability of the measurement or classification system (visually or using instruments)?
5. Are you not conducting inspections in places where in reality the minimum total costs will be in the absence of checks ?
6. Are there areas where you do not carry out inspections, although 100% inspection is needed there to minimize total costs?
7. What data do you record from inspection results?
8. In what form?
9. In the form of control charts or batch (process flow) charts?
10. If registration is not carried out, then why?
11. How else do you use the notes you keep?
12. If you don't keep records, why not?
13. If you don't keep records at a certain point, why don't you stop checking there?

Responsibility for quality

1. How much of the quality and performance problems are related to
   1. production workers;
   2. with the system (management responsibility)?
2. How do you know this? Answer this question for only three or four major items.

Locations of defects

1. How many losses do you attribute to improper handling of products:
   1. during production;
   2. when packing;
   3. transportation;
   4. installation?
2. What data do you have on these issues?
3. What are you doing about this?

Employee training

1. What are you doing to improve training for new employees?
2. What about retraining to work with new products, new procedures or equipment?
3. Why is every attempt to launch a new product or service always one of a kind? Answer: Once the plan has already begun, making changes to them takes too much time and money. Consequently, while work continues according to the original plan, there is little room for improvement.
4. Can people responsible for training determine whether the employee is trained or not yet ? How?
5. Do they know that they only have one chance? That after an employee has been trained once, he cannot be helped by repeated training using the same methodology?
6. Why are job training lessons, or retraining lessons for a new job, or piano or violin lessons always one of a kind? (Answer: Once knowledge is invested, it becomes a foundation that is difficult to redo).
7. Do you encourage your people to improve themselves?
8. Does your company have an educational program?
9. Do you inform your employees about courses taught at the company's training center?

If you are in charge of a workshop

1. Are your individual customers more satisfied today than they were two years ago? Why?
2. What is the progress in terms of equipment maintenance? Is it improving?
3. What can be said about labor productivity?
4. How are things going with inventory turnover?
5. What is the situation with repetitive operations that do not change when products change: do you keep records and control charts for some of them?
6. Are any of your problems stable?
7. How do you know this?
8. What data can you confirm this with?
9. If so, who is responsible for improvements? (Answer: Management.)

Using statistical management methods

1. What do you understand by stable system ?
2. Has any quality or productivity issue you were concerned about stabilized?
3. How do you know this?
4. Why were the early improvement efforts so effective and encouraging?
5. Why does the rate of improvement slow down as the process approaches a steady state?
6. If the process is stabilized, who is responsible for inventing and applying improvement methods? (Answer: You, management.)
7. If you have a qualified statistician in your company, are you making the most of their knowledge and capabilities? Does it teach statistical thinking to your management, engineers, chemists, physicists, production workers, foremen, foremen, purchasing agents, and commercial research and product design specialists? Do you send it to statisticians' conferences? Is he working to find problems and their causes throughout the company and to eliminate them? Does it solve all your problems with design, quality, purchasing, tolerances, tool testing? Does he have the authority to freely visit all departments in the company to find problems and work on them? If not, why not?
8. Have you tried to ensure that your statistical work is consistent with the best interests of the company?
9. If you don't have a qualified statistician, how much effort do you make to find one? He will be able to help you solve problems with quality, productivity, procurement, and product redesign.

Staff Engagement

1. Are all services and departments in the company involved in improvements?
2. Or do some remain on the sidelines?
3. What steps are you taking to identify and help these currently inactive units?
4. Do you rely on staff involvement, management participation groups, quality of work life, quality circles, posters, quality calls, and then allow them to float along without any help from management, rather than doing their job?

Benefit to society

1. Does your company participate in standards committees?
2. What does your company do for society?