Dorian Shainin (September 26, 1914 – January 7, 2000) was an American quality consultant, aeronautics engineer, author, and college professor most notable for his contributions in the fields of industrial problem solving, product reliability, and quality engineering, particularly the creation and development of the "Red X" concept.
Shainin (pronounced SHAY-nin), founder of the technical-problem-solving company Shainin LLC, is responsible for the development of over 20 statistical engineering techniques that have become the core of the "Shainin System" for quality and reliability improvement.
Throughout his life, Dorian Shainin worked to improve the quality and reliability of an array of products, including paper, printing, textiles, rubber, nuclear energy, airplanes, automobiles, cassette decks, space ships, light bulbs and disposable diapers, with clients representing over 200 different industries, ranging from the U.S. Department of Defense, Rolls-Royce Ltd. and Exxon to Polaroid, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T and Ford Motor. In total, Shainin advised over 800 companies, 43 of which were among the Fortune 100.
Early life
Dorian Shainin was born in San Francisco on September 26, 1914. He grew up in San Francisco, Shanghai, and New York. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York.
Early career
After receiving his degree in aeronautical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1936, Shainin became a design engineer at the Hamilton Standard Division of United Aircraft Corporation (now United Technologies Corporation).
In 1939 US industry had begun to focus on the war effort, and Shainin became a licensee coordinator responsible for helping new Hamilton Standard licensees solve problems. By the end of the war, Shainin was in charge of quality and reliability at Hamilton Standard, having gained national recognition for his invention of the Hamilton Standard Lot Plot.
Lot Plot
Lot Plot refers to a statistical method for acceptance sampling developed by Dorian Shainin in the 1940s. This statistical technique uses the graphical analysis of variable sample data in order to determine if a lot consisting of potentially faulty parts should be accepted or set aside for 100% inspection.
Walter A. Shewhart's development of control charts demonstrated the application of statistical techniques to manufacturing and illustrated the effectiveness of graphical presentation and analysis. Shainin incorporated these concepts in his development of Lot Plot.
In 1946 Shainin was able to demonstrate to the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics that Lot Plot was more effective than 100% inspection. Following this, the Navy agreed to make Lot Plot a standard. Soon Lot Plot was adopted as a standard across many industries.
Taking the advice of his friend and mentor Joseph M. Juran, Shainin turned to the world of consulting. In 1952 Shainin joined Rath & Strong, Inc., a management consulting firm based in Lexington, Massachusetts, holding the position of Senior Vice President.
Red X and Pareto
Shainin's development of the "Red X" concept originated from his association with Joseph Juran. In the 1940s, Juran coined and popularized the notion of "the vital few and trivial many," also known as "The Pareto Principle," recognizing the uneven impact of problems on business performance to be the same phenomenon that Vilfredo Pareto had observed in respect to the distribution of wealth. As suggested by Juran, "I observed (as had many others before me) that quality defects are unequal in frequency, i.e., when a long list of defects was arranged in the order of frequency, a relative few of the defects accounted for the bulk of the defectiveness."
In 1947, Dorian Shainin recognized that the Pareto principle could be applied effectively to the solving of variation problems. Shainin concluded that, amongst the thousands of variables that could cause a change in the value of an output, one cause-effect relationship had to be stronger than the others. Shainin called this primary cause the "Big Red X" and demonstrated that the cause can exist as an interaction among independent variables. The effect of the Red X is then magnified by the square-root-of-the-sum-of-the-squares law, thereby isolating the root cause.
Shainin asserted that his application of statistical methods was more cost-effective and simpler than Taguchi methods. In order to determine the "Red X," Shainin would swap pairs of parts between functional and faulty equipment until the one part responsible for the failure is discovered. Shainin would claim that he could often find the primary defective part within a dozen paired swaps.