Differences between Japanese Characteristics and those of Europeans from the viewpoint of TQM: -Ways of thinking at the stage of design and/or development of new products-

In the 11th AQCS(1997), the paper entitled 'Statistical Analysis of Baseball Records - Jinx and National Characteristics -' was presented by the same authors. At that time, the differences between Japanese characteristics and those of Europeans, using baseball data were discussed, mainly from the viewpoint of 'ways of thinking about chance cause and assignable cause.' In this paper, the authors described also on the same subject from the different viewpoint, 'ways of thinking at the design and development stage of new products', From this viewpoint, the difference also be found. It seems that the most significant difference between Japan and Germany exists in the field of aeroplanes design. The German ideas in the field were very unique, therefore the authors classified and named their ideas as: A) 'Quantitative analysis' type idea, and B) 'Chemical synthetic' type idea. The former concept is composed of two ways of thinking: a) All parts essential for just flying must be used, but b) All other parts shall be rejected, as far as possible. The latter concept is that, the all additional parts necessary for the development of the above 'purified' original product should be added respectively, depending on the requests of customers. These ideas are outlined using the actual examples of German aeroplane.