Company's quality crusade was launched by an American

Toyota Motor Corp., in many ways the quintessential Japanese corporation, owes at least some of its gleaming quality reputation to an American, the late W. Edwards Deming, who in the 1960s helped set Toyota on the path to what became known as Total Quality Management.

It is a debt Toyota readily acknowledges.

"I believe that we owe a great deal of thanks to America for our sense of the importance of quality and our acquisition of control methods," said Shoichiro Toyoda, honorary chairman of Toyota Motor Corp., whose father, Kiichiro Toyoda, founded the car company in 1937.

"After all, it was our initial failure in the American market and the teachings of Dr. Deming that taught us these key lessons," Shoichiro Toyoda, 82, said in a speech in Washington in September.

Deming, who died in 1993 at the age of 93, was an American statistician, time-and-motion expert and populist philosopher. He was revered in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s but largely ignored in the United States. Deming's name comes up in auto industry circles as an example of the expression, "a prophet without honor in his own country."

But today automakers around the world aspire to imitate Toyota's methods, which have a lot of Deming's ideas at the core.

Dave Power, founder of research and consulting firm J.D. Power and Associates, remembered in an interview that the first time he recalls hearing Deming's name was at the end of one of Power's first visits to Toyota in Japan.

At the time, Japanese autos were still known in the United States for poor quality, thanks in part to the hapless Toyopet Crown.

"As I was leaving for the airport, somebody asked me if I knew Dr. Deming or if I knew about the Deming award. ... I had never heard of him," said Power, 76.

In 1970, the Deming Prize Committee awarded the first Japan Quality Medal to Toyota for demonstrating "continuous improvement efforts toward quality and dependability of products." And Toyota had won the Deming Application Prize in 1965, for following Deming's "continuous improvement" philosophy.

In his speech this fall, Shoichiro Toyoda admitted that Toyota had learned its lesson the hard way.

"The problem was that the Crown was just not built for driving in America, where cars run over 60 mph for hour after hour," he said.

"In 1957, I took two Crowns to drive in America as an experiment. I still remember the time I drove them on American highways. It turned out to be dangerous to enter a highway on an uphill slope. That was because the Crown had poor acceleration due to its heavy body and lack of power. So I was forced to find an entrance to the highway on a downhill slope," he said.

Toyota withdrew the Toyopet Crown in 1961. The Land Cruiser light truck kept the lights on for the franchise in the United States, while Toyota went back to the drawing board, working on the Corona.

Toyoda said that based on Deming's philosophy, Toyota launched an effort to improve quality in 1961, leading to winning the Deming award in 1965. The Corona, which was a huge improvement over the Toyopet Crown, was the first model developed as Toyota adopted a Total Quality Management approach.

Deming's philosophy, as practiced by Toyota, pushes responsibility for quality to the assembly line, giving each worker the authority to stop the line if a quality glitch is spotted.

Total Quality Management also includes just-in-time delivery of parts.

Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking is the first to admit he borrowed Toyota's Total Quality Management system when he restructured Porsche, starting in 1992.

In Don't Follow the Crowd, a book published this year, Wiedeking recalled that the first time one of his Toyota-trained consultants, Chihiro Nakao, visited the Porsche factory in Germany, Nakao commented, "Where's your factory? Surely this must be the parts store" because of the huge inventory of parts stacked next to the assembly line.

Wiedeking said that at Porsche in the late 1980s, 20 percent of all parts were delivered at least three days late; one-third of deliveries contained the wrong number of items; and 10,000 parts per 1 million were defective. At Toyota, thanks to Total Quality Management, only five parts per million could not be used, and more than 99 percent of parts were delivered on time and in the right quantities, he said.

Wiedeking said that 18 months into the restructuring, parts storage at Porsche was reduced from 40 percent of the factory floor space to zero.

"Without the Japanese, we would never have completed the process so quickly and efficiently," Wiedeking said.

And without Deming, Toyota might not be quite the Toyota it is today.