ABSTRACT
Only by using a 'structured means of control' can an organization convert high-cost controls into business-assuring, profit-enhancing control. Dr William Edwards Deming was an American with career experience across all the fields of statistics, lecturing, writing and consulting. Deming's ideas were later exported around the world in the quality revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s. Academics and industrialists have credited Deming, Shewhart and Juran with giving birth to an industrial revolution through their development of statistical control of quality levels into a new way of managing business. Deming's ideas remain vibrant signposts for management system writers, managers and auditors. At the heart of Deming's legacy to the business world is his adoption of four connected process improvement steps widely known as the 'Deming Wheel' of PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act). Deming believed that to effect transformation of the style in which something is being managed there had to be an external perspective.
