Lean Six Sigma

Honoré Blanc was a Parisian gunsmith who, in 1790, revealed a manufacturing system that astonished his peers. He had managed to produce interchangeable parts that were similar enough to allow for random selection of parts during the assembly process. At a public demonstration, Blanc assembled functional guns from components located in bins. He realized the potential of his system to reduce the cost of making and repairing guns and to provide work for “unskilled vagabonds” (ALDER, 1997). He also hoped it would lead to further innovations in manufacturing. Dr. W. Edwards Deming was a friend of Walter Shewhart, who went to Japan in 1950 to teach statistics and U.S. quality methods. His teachings had a large role to play in helping Japanese manufacturers become a major presence in the global market. Deming stressed the importance of analyzing data against statistically computed limits as a way of quantifying variation.