Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!tivoli!alan
From: alan@tivoli.UUCP (Alan R. Weiss)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: industrial engineering and metrics (was Re: bridge building and discipline)
Message-ID: <781@tivoli.UUCP>
Date: 24 May 91 16:36:02 GMT
References: <1991May14.150350.2837@den.mmc.com> <1991May15.180943.6796@netcom.COM> <1991May15.223135.12381@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1991May16.151913.13770@weyrich.UUCP> <773@tivoli.UUCP> <1991May23.131739.11711@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: alan@tivoli.UUCP (Alan R. Weiss)
Organization: Tivoli Systems Inc., Austin, TX
Lines: 42

In article <1991May23.131739.11711@m.cs.uiuc.edu> marick@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Brian Marick) writes:
>I wrote:
>
>>>>The modern approach, following Taguchi, Deming, and company, has (in
>>>>principle) abandoned a measurement (cost of quality) and replaced it
>>>>with a system of faith that asserts that increased quality is *always*
>>>>cost-effective.  In this case, the faith has worked better than the
>>>>metric.
>
I wrote back:
>
>>This is actually incorrect.  Deming and other Modern Quality Theorists
>>insist upon Statistical Process Control to measure the Cost of Quality. 
>>I refer you to Crosby, Gilb, Demings, Juran, et al.

To which my friend Brian Marick responded with:

>I think you may have misunderstood my point.  I was talking about
>measuring cost of quality, which is different from measuring some
>quality attribute.

No, I didn't misunderstand :-)  The guru's all say to do both:  try to
measure the cost of quality (in Crosby's eyes, the cost of rework)
AND constantly improve your process (Demings).

>  You of course measure quality attributes; the
>system of faith is that should you never stop improving them.  This
>differs from the traditional approach where you measure the cost of
>improvement and stop when the product is "good enough".  

None of the gurus say you should stop improving quality, only that
such things as product shipment dates finally come into play.

I believe we are saying close to the same things.

_______________________________________________________________________
Alan R. Weiss                           TIVOLI Systems, Inc.
E-mail: alan@tivoli.com                 6034 West Courtyard Drive,
E-mail: alan@whitney.tivoli.com	        Suite 210
Voice : (512) 794-9070                  Austin, Texas USA  78730
Fax   : (512) 794-0623
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