The best ideas come from the workers

By Selwyn Parker

Today, all car-makers tap their workforce for quality ideas, but none more effectively than Porsche, where workers submitted 28,400 suggestions in 1988. Of these, an astonishing 21,868 - 77 per cent - were implemented.

And the shopfloor Einsteins were duly recompensed.

The late W. Edwards Deming, one of the fathers of quality, would approve of this.

An American whose ideas were spurned in post-war America, Deming went off instead to Japan's fledgling car manufacturers who embraced the concept of quality wholeheartedly.

While Hondas and Toyotas got better and better, cars got worse and worse in the United States.

Then struggling to save Chrysler, Lee Iacocca candidly recalls the quality problem in his biography: "Sometimes our cars were so bad, [the public] felt we built them that way on purpose." That's a reference to the old planned-obsolescence argument.

Iacocca's solution to the cars rattles and bangs was the establishment of quality circles in which plant workers were involved.

"That may be the most important consideration of all when it comes to quality - that the worker believes his ideas will be heard," concludes Iacocca.

* Contributing writer Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz