Departments
Intermediate Japanese - Free Online Course
DEMINGU SHŌ
デミング賞
Deming Prize
Each year Japanese companies compete for the Deming Prize. The award is given to companies that demonstrate excellence in the application of Total Quality Management (TQM) and statistical quality control. Past winners include some of Japanese most famous corporations. For an organization, the Deming Prize is a tremendous honor, as it signifies achievement in the quality revolution that drove Japan’s postwar economic miracle.
About Dr. Edwards Deming (1900- 1993)
The prize is named for Dr. Edwards Deming, an American statistician who became an unlikely hero of Japan’s rise from wartime defeat to manufacturing excellence. Deming won fame in Japan long before he ever received widespread recognition in his home country. Deming’s revolutionary insights into quality control and total quality management were virtually ignored by American manufacturers until the early 1980s, when competition from Japan forced them to look for new solutions.
William Edwards Deming was born in Sioux City, Iowa in 1900, and grew up in Wyoming. He studied mathematics and engineering at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. He later earned a masters degree at the University of Colorado, and a Ph.D. at Yale.
Deming’s early career activities had nothing to do with manufacturing. In 1927 the U.S. Department of Agriculture hired him to study the effects of nitrogen on crops. If not for a few random turns of fate, Deming might have finished out his career as a government researcher.
Deming Develops a Passion for Statistics
While working at the Department of Agriculture, Deming met Walter A. Shewhart. Shewhart was a statistician at Bell Laboratories, where he was developing methods of applying statistics to manufacturing processes. Deming took immediate interest in Shewhart’s work. Deming studied statistics with Shewhart, and with a renowned British statistician, Ronald Fisher.
Deming’s own background in mathematics enabled him to quickly assimilate the principles he learned from Shewhart and Fisher. In time, Deming began to acquire a reputation as a statistics expert in his own right. The Census Bureau learned of Deming’s expertise, and recruited him to work on preparations for the 1940 census. Previous U.S. censuses had been based on exhaustive polling of the entire population. Deming improved the 1940 census by introducing the concept of sampling, which polled a representative portion of Americans only.
During World War II, Deming began advising U.S. companies engaged in war-related production about the practical applications of statistics in manufacturing and quality control. After the war, he parlayed this experience into a private consulting business. His work as a private consultant took him to India, Europe, and various locations in North America.