W. Edwards Deming - Quality Quotes

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They realized that the gains that you get by statistical methods are gains that you get without new machinery, without new people. Anybody can produce quality if he lowers his production rate. That is not what I am talking about. Statistical thinking and statistical methods are to Japanese production workers, foremen, and all the way through the company, a second language. In statistical control you have a reproducible product hour after hour, day after day. And see how comforting that is to management, they now know what they can produce, they know what their costs are going to be.

W. Edwards Deming
Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.

W. Edwards Deming
Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

W. Edwards Deming
In Europe and in America, people are now more interested in the cost of quality and in systems of quality-audit. But in Japan, we are keeping very strong interest to improve quality by use of methods which you started.... when we improve quality we also improve productivity, just as you told us in 1950 would happen.

W. Edwards Deming
Quality begins with the intent, which is fixed by management.

W. Edwards Deming
We cannot rely on mass inspection to improve quality, though there are times when 100 percent inspection is necessary. As Harold S. Dodge said many years ago, 'You cannot inspect quality into a product.' The quality is there or it isn't by the time it's inspected.

W. Edwards Deming
He that expects to quantify in dollars the gains that will accrue to a company year by year for a program for improvement of quality expounded in [Out of the Crisis] will suffer delusion. He should know before he starts that he will be able to quantify only a trivial part of the gain.

W. Edwards Deming
It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to - that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated. Support is not enough; action is required.

W. Edwards Deming
The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.

W. Edwards Deming
Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

W. Edwards Deming
Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force

W. Edwards Deming
Statistical research is particularly necessary in the government service because of the high level of quality and economy that the public has the right to expect in government statistics.

W. Edwards Deming
Mere allocation of huge sums of money for quality will not bring quality.

W. Edwards Deming