ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the major contribution of Shigeo Shingo to the quality movement. Shigeo Shingo, who died in 1990, is perhaps the least well known in the West of the Japanese quality gurus. Educated as a mechanical engineer he became a consultant in 1945, subsequently working with a wide variety of companies in many industries basing his work on the belief that ‘you, the customer, pay for the waste’ Shigeo Shingo. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his mechanical engineering background and training, Shingo adhered to a mechanistic approach to organisation throughout his career. From engineering jobs and people in the scientific management approach of his early work, he moved to the quantitative methods of statistical quality control, finally to error prevention through engineering. The idea of poka-yoke is similar to the concepts employed in cybernetic systems – systems which in the process of going out of control put themselves back in control again.
