Ensuring your management design-in operational excellence to guarantee the lasting survival of your company is why quality guru W. Edwards Deming asked his famous “WHAT?” and “HOW?” questions.

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Deming would expect that managers had a solid answer to the question: “If you want your company to reach Operational Excellence in the next five years, then explain to us all, EXACTLY HOW will you do it?”

Now, you can build a Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability to successfully answer all ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions

The late W. Edwards Deming, the father of the Japanese quality revolution, asked four insightful questions about creating a purposeful business that is customer-centric. Two questions are in his book, Out of the Crisis, and two in his final book, The New Economics. The questions were aimed at getting you to think straight and to think right about your organization’s purpose and how to design-in operational excellence is the best way it is achieved.

Listed in order the questions are:

1. What business are we in? (The New Economics, Pg. 10, 1994, MIT Press)
2. What product or service will help our customers more? (The New Economics, Pg. 10)
3. Where do you hope to be five years from now? (Out of the Crisis, Pg. 19, 2000, MIT Press)
4. How may you reach this goal—by what method? (Out of the Crisis, Pg. 19)

Those questions are always relevant, honest and true. In The New Economics Deming gives the example of why carburetor makers went out of business. Their mistake was they thought they were in the carburetor making business. They were very wrong—they were actually in the “stoichiometric fuel delivery” business. As soon as fuel injection made vehicles more economic and reliable the carburetor was doomed. And so were the makers of carburetors, because they never truly understood what their customers really wanted from their products.

Deming’s message is: Your business has to keep innovating and inventing new solutions that improve customers’ lives. Otherwise someone else will, and then you become irrelevant.

Those four questions above are fundamental to everything a business will ever achieve. If your vision is that in five years time you want your company to be one of the greats of your industry, then HOW do you do that? Deming’s questions demand we decide exactly HOW to get there, all the way to the successful conclusion. In answer to that vital business survival need the Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability was invented to give organizations a simple, sure method to design-in operational excellence.

If you are interested in the answer we give to industrial operations who ask us, “HOW EXACTLY does a PWW EAM System-of-Reliability get companies to Operational Excellence?” It is summarized in the EXECUTIVE REPORT you can download with this web link: How industrial operations use Plant Wellness Way EAM to get world class production.

NOTES:

Stoichiometric is the ideal proportion of constituents in a mix of chemicals