I recently had an opportunity to learn about quality in industry in a Soviet Bloc nation, the former German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany. I was invited to dinner with a family that included somebody who worked in a cotton mill during the final decades of East Germany.
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I had heard stories of the famous East German Trabant car (East Germany’s answer to the Volkswagen Beetle). I had heard about how production and economic data in the Soviet sphere of influence were often poorly collected or outright faked. I had also heard about how poor quality was in the USSR. This dinner seemed like an excellent time to learn about quality in a world that had ended before I entered the field of quality.
My dinner host was a textile technology “Meister” (master) who worked at the VEB Vereinigte Baumwollspinnereien und Zwirnereien (VEB), a publically owned operation, and united cotton-spinning mill and doubling mill in Hohenfichte, Germany. The company was a state-run textile company with between 400–500 employees at the Hohenfichte facility, and at one point 50 plants and about 14,800 employees in the entire enterprise.
My host started as an apprentice at the company and finished as the equivalent of a production supervisor with 25 employees and 35 machines under her control. In addition to supervising the employees, the production manager was also responsible for safety, quality, repairing machines, and ensuring cleanliness of the machines because of the influence cleanliness had on quality.
A female production manager may not have been typical in the West during the 1970s, but in East Germany, everybody worked. The government made sure if it. Gender was not a barrier to employment; unfortunately, free choice in choosing jobs was not typical. In contrast, far fewer West German women worked outside of the home. The East German government was not so much egalitarian as simply desperate to find workers.
There were no quality management system certifications in East Germany, and the first quality manual didn’t appear until the 1990s; however, there was a Qualität Sicherungs System (quality assurance system), which functioned as a quality management system, complete with procedures. There was also no International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in East Germany, but there was a government TGL, which stood for Technischen Normen, Gütevorschriften und Lieferbedingungen (i.e., technical standards, quality specifications, and terms of delivery). In contrast to ISO standards, conformance to the TGL standards were a requirement.
The company placed a heavy emphasis on quality and had a Technische Kontrollorganisation (technical control organization), which was the facility’s quality department. The technical control organization was managed by a textile engineer and included a materials laboratory for testing production material. Typical tests included checking the weight of the material, pull-off forces, thread strength, turns per meter of material, and tests to detect areas that were too thick or thin. Samples of material where also sent to government laboratories in East Germany, until the wall came down and equipment was installed for automatic in-line testing.
The technical control organization department had an inspector stationed in every production hall who would check the in-process material to ensure it was in tolerance. Deviations where logged, and the production supervisor was immediately informed if a problem was detected. Corrective actions were implemented immediately; generally, the affected machine was adjusted.
I was told that defective textile material was scrapped because it was unusable. This was actually an exception in East Germany; generally, all material was sold. This place could scrap its defective material because it was producing yarn; a broken thread was not reparable and could not be sold for lower-quality uses. Other state-owned industries classified material as first class, which was the best, or second and third class. All three classes were sold in East Germany, but only first-class material was exported. This matches what Professor F. Ergermayer explained about socialist nation quality ratings in the 1988 fourth edition of Juran’s Quality Control Handbook (McGraw Hill, 1988). According to Ergermayer, product certification with three grades for quality were used in many socialist countries, although the certification criteria where not uniformly applied across countries.
It should come as no surprise that East Germany seldom scrapped anything that was usable. Many material goods where in short supply in Soviet Bloc countries. Because of what I know about quality behind the Iron Curtain, I was surprised at the level of quality behind the wall in East Germany. Maybe I should not have been so surprised. The country was practically cut off from the free world and faced resource scarcity. An appropriate response to resource scarcity is to make what you have count by emphasizing quality to reduce or eliminate scrap.
I was informed that the Soviets were not the only ones who faked their quality and production-related data. A computer programmer who worked in East Germany informed me that the programmers where always instructed to make it possible to modify data in the databases in a way that would make it possible to produce the desired results.
Although both the USSR and East Germany were dominated by Moscow, it may be unfair to compare the two former nations in regard to quality. East Germany had a smaller and more homogeneous population than the USSR, and East Germany also had newer machinery in its factories. The Soviets took East Germany’s machinery at the end of World War II, so East Germany had to modernize while the Soviet Union was using World War II and pre-war machinery.
The level of quality in East Germany seems to have been far higher than I would have expected. My impressions of the East German Trabant may have also been mistaken. Time magazine voted the Trabant as one of the worst cars ever, but that may have more to do with the simple design and lack of accessories such as cup holders and brake lights. There are still many Trabants on the road today; I passed a few just walking across the street to dinner. And there are even groups of Trabant owners around the world who get together to meet and show off their cars.
Knowing what I do about the required German automotive inspections, I would assume these old East German-built Trabants are all mechanically sound and have brake lights, although I do have my doubts about cup holders.
Comments
the Trabant
We have friends in Germany who were born & raised in the East, were 'selected' to immigrate west before the wall fell, and now live about an hour west of Munich. They have a Trabant in the barn - I spent an hour or two looking it over. Fascinating!
Trabant means Companion
It comes from slav space language. I don't know much of East Germany or beyond Iron Curtain indusry quality, but my wife was born in Croatia when Tito was still alive, and Jugoslavia a united nation. She still points out how little, sturdy cars, like the Trabant or the Renault R4, named "Katriza" over there, were the most appreciated by the people, who didn't care much for emissions or comfort or optionals, but for traveling in Countries where public transportation took eons to move people from one village to another. I don't know what's happening in the rest of EU, but italian sales of Dacia and Tata models are dramatically increasing: like the Trabant, they may not be so fancy, but who cares, as long as they take you home, safely and cheaply?
Quality behind the Iron Curtain
My cousin was a director of a flour mill in Prague, Czechoslovakia. I had the opportunity to visit him before the wall came down. The mill had machines that were constantly breaking down. We made a trip to visit relatives in the countryside. While on the trip my cousin had to stop at a machine shop to pick up a part for the mill. The machine shop was a disaster. The car park was littered with rusting pieces of metal and the staff had a difficult time locating the part that my cousin was after. While driving away, I thought to myself that there was no doubt which side would win the cold war. No need to drop a bomb or fire a bullet.
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