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A program of improvement begins with enthusiasm, exhortations, revival meetings, posters and pledges. Quality becomes a religion. Quality as measured by the results of inspections start by showing a dramatic improvement, getting better and better by the month. Everyone expects the path of improvement to continue. Instead, success can grind downward to a halt. At best, it levels off. It may even turn upward. Management becomes worried. They plead, beg, beseech, implore, pray, entreat and supplicate the heads of their organisation involved in production with taunts, harassment and even threats, based on the awful truth that if there is no substantial improvement soon, we shall be out of business.

What happened? The rapid improvement seen at first stemmed from the removal of special causes, detected by horse sense. This was fairly simple, but as the more obvious means of improvement dried up, improvement levelled off. It has been our intention to show that if a program of improvement commences with a program of actions based on Dr. Deming's fourteen points and the removal of the deadly diseases and obstacles, improvement will continue as long as management leads the program.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the management of Perpetual Trustees ISD for the support in preparation of this paper, Mr. John Alien, now at BT, for the stimulating ideas, the author's cousin Routh Lewin- Broit from the University of Sydney, for the research assistance and the author's friends in ISD for proof reading the paper again and again ... The author wishes to acknowledge, too, Mr Castro Lysander from ISD for the paper-shifting and skateboard-riding turtles.

REFERENCES

Deming, W. Edwards. 1986. Out of the Crisis. Cambridge: MIT Centre for Advanced Engineering Study. ISBN 0-911379-01-0 - Gilton, Shelly J. & Howard S. 1987. The

Deming Guide to Quality and Competitive Position Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-198441-1 -

Donald J. Wheeler, David S. Chambers, 1986, Understanding Statistical Process Control: Statistical Process Controls, Inc. Knoxville, Tennessee. ISBN not supplied. -

DECtrace for VMS User's Guide, 1991 Digital Equipment Corporation Maynard, Massachusetts. Part Number AA-PB90B-TE. ISBN not supplied. -

Neviene Torki, Construction and Interpretation of Control Charts for Quality Management, 1992 N. TORKI - Melbourne ISBN 0-7316-8871-6

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