“Made in Taiwan”, or “MIT” has become such a hot catch-phrase recently, not only on TV advertisements, but also now we find that there are lot of products with MIT appearing in retail markets. We can say MIT is the name of good quality.

Taiwan used to be a base of manufacturing, but after China manufactured products, flooded the world with its lowest prices, most of the factories were moved to China. It is now seldom that products are still made in Taiwan. Meanwhile, those China products, no matter whether we call them copied or fake, are really cheap.  But the following news was that more and more bad quality issues were discovered on those products, with even some of these cases resulted in people getting hurt. With so much bad news regarding poor quality China products, I started to miss the quality of MIT.

20 years ago, I heard a story from a foreigner in which a customer complained about a bad quality umbrella.  Other people would comment that the umbrella must be made in Taiwan.  I was so angry, and argued with the foreigner who believed that MIT is representative of cheap but bad quality products, much like China’s products are viewed now.

It makes me recall those efforts to bypass quality control during manufacturing.  At that time, Taiwan was the biggest manufacturing station.  Absolutely - the quantity is what we focused on, and quality was always challenged as a result.  When we faced the pressure of making shipments, quality was often an issue argued by the production and quality departments. When the quality was not up to standard, what we could do was just rework to bring it up to be acceptable.  Rework and over-night work was performed just to make sure we could meet the shipping schedule.  At the time it seemed like the only way to handle both quality and quantity.  Then, a new concept and procedure called “PDCA” was introduced.  PCDA is the acronym for “Plan, Do, Check, and Action”.  When I first was introduced to the concept of a PDCA cycle, I did not think it to be useful.  First, it takes time to run through a cycle, and the second, it is endless.  It also needs many departments to coordinate with one another and work toward a common goal.  It requires a feedback system from these many departments, and has to be continuously executed to realize the best results.  But, as long as these ideals were really executed upon, we saw significant improvements in quality.  Through these procedures, people have learned the concept of quality, and because we have to work more closely with other colleagues, a lot of better communications were established during the process.