Continuous improvement as a business strategy and discipline developed as an offshoot of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor described business as a series of interlocking workflows or processes that should be managed using data.
In the 1930’s Walter Shewhart developed a set of management disciplines for process control and continuous improvement. These disciplines were based upon Taylor’s principles of business workflows and a reliance on data. Shewhart’s work is the foundation for the engineering and management disciplines of Quality Assurance and Quality Control found in most organizations today.
One of Shewhart’s students and proteges was Edward Deming, who used these principles to remake the Japanese automotive industry into a global quality and engineering powerhouse following World War II.