The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

STANDARDIZATION AND COST REDUCTION
Ford’s approach to product and process design begins with what modern 
practitioners would call Quality Function Deployment (QFD), which gets 
the voice of the customer into the procedure at a very early stage. Ford 
stresses that one must begin with the consumer and only then address the 
product design and the manufacturing process.
* * *
The standardization that effects [sic] large economies for the consumer 
results in profits of such gross magnitude to the producer that he can scarcely 
know what to do with his money. But his effort must be sincere, painstaking, 
and fearless. Cutting out a half-a-dozen models is not standardizing. It may 
be, and usually is, only the limiting of business, for if one is selling on the 
ordinary basis of profit—that is, on the basis of taking as much money away 
from the consumer as he will give up—then surely the consumer ought to 
have a wide range of choice.
Standardization, then, is the final stage of the process. We start with con-
sumer, work back through the design, and finally arrive at manufacturing. 
The manufacturing becomes a means to the end of service.
It is important to bear this order in mind. As yet, the order is not thor-
oughly understood. The price relation is not understood. The notion persists 
that prices ought to be kept up. On the contrary, good business—large con-
sumption—depends on their going down.