Quality Gurus - Joseph Juran

Joseph Moses Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) was a Romanian-born American engineer and management consultant. He is principally remembered as an evangelist for quality and quality management, having written several influential books on those subjects.⁸ He has authored hundreds of papers and 12 books, including Juran’s Quality control hand book, Quality Planning and Analysis, and Juran on Leadership for Quality. Juran founded the Juran Institute in 1979. The Institute is an international training, certification, and consulting company which provides training and consulting services in quality management, Lean manufacturing management and business process management, as well as Six Sigma certification. The institute is based in Southbury, Connecticut.⁹

Quality, according to Juran, means that a product meets customer needs leading to customer satisfaction, and quality also means all the activities in which a business engages in to ensure that the product meets customer needs.

Major contributions of Joseph Juran are:

• Juran’s Trilogy
• Cost of Quality
• Juran’s 10 steps to quality improvement

Juran’s Trilogy

Juran was one of the first to write about the cost of poor quality. Juran’s Trilogy is an approach to cross functional management that is composed of three managerial processes: planning, control, and improvement. Quality planning is all about developing methods to stay in tune with customer’s expectations. Quality control involves checking the products produced with specifications. Quality improvement involves the continuous business process improvement.¹⁰

• Quality Planning: This is the activity of developing the products and processes required to meet customer’s needs. It involves a series of universal steps which can be abbreviated as follows:

a.  Establish quality goals

b. Identify the customers- those who will be impacted by the efforts to meet the goal.

c.  Determine the customers’ needs

d.  Develop product features that respond to customers’ needs

e.  Develop processes that are able to produce those product features

f.   Establish process controls, and transfer the resulting plans to the operating forces

• Quality Control: This process consists of the following steps:

a.  Evaluate actual quality performance

b.  Compare actual performance to quality goals

c.   Act on the difference¹¹

• Quality Improvement: This process is the means of raising quality performance to unprecedented levels (“breakthrough”). The methodology consists of a series of universal steps:

a. Establish the infrastructure needed to secure annual quality improvement.

b.  Identify the specific needs for improvement -the improvement projects

c. For each project establish a project team with clear responsibility for bringing the project to a successful conclusion

d. Provide the resource, motivation, and training needed by the team to:

e. Diagnose the cause

f.  Stimulate establishment of remedies

g. Establish controls to hold the gains¹²

Cost of Quality

Cost of Quality (COQ) is regarded as an important QM technique which measures the cost incurred in achieving better and improved product or service quality.¹³

• Prevention Costs: The costs of all activities specifically designed to prevent poor quality in products or services. Examples are the costs of: 

·         New product review

·         Quality planning

·         Supplier capability surveys

·         Process capability evaluations

·         Quality improvement team meetings 

• Appraisal Costs: The costs associated with measuring, evaluating or auditing products or services to assure conformance to quality standards and performance requirements. These include costs of:

·         Incoming and source inspection/test of purchased material

·         In-process and final inspection/test

·         Product, process or service audits

·         Calibration of measuring and test equipment

·         Associated supplies and materials

• Failure Costs: The costs resulting from products or services not conforming to requirements or customer/user needs. Failure costs are divided into internal and external failure categories.

• Internal Failure Costs: Failure costs occurring prior to delivery or shipment of the product, or the furnishing of a service, to the customer.

o   Scrap

o   Rework

o   Re-inspection

o   Re-testing

• External Failure Costs: Failure costs occurring after delivery or shipment of the product — and during or after furnishing of a service — to the customer. Examples are the costs of:

o   Processing customer complaints

o   Warranty claims

o   Product recalls

o   Customer returns ¹⁴

Juran’s 10 steps to quality improvement

Juran believed quality is associated with customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the product, and emphasized the necessity for ongoing quality improvement through a succession of small improvement projects carried out throughout the organization.¹⁵ His ten steps to quality improvement are:

• Build awareness of the need and opportunity for improvement

• Set goals for improvement

• Organize to reach the goals

• Provide training

• Carry out projects to solve problems

• Report progress

• Give recognition

• Communicate results

• Keep score of improvements achieved

• Maintain momentum by making annual improvement part of the regular systems and processes   of the company

References 

 8. Phillips-Donaldson, Debbie (May 2004), "100 Years Of Juran", Quality Progress (Milwaukee,    Wisconsin: American Society for Quality) 37 (5): PP:25–39
9.    http://www.juran.com/juran-international/
10.  Gupta, Total Quality Mgmt, 2E, Tata McGraw-Hill Education, New Delhi, 2009, Pg:42
11.   J.M. Juran, Juran on Planning for Quality, The Free Press, New York, pp. 11-12.
12.   Joseph Juran, http://www.qualitygurus.com/gurus/list-of-gurus/joseph-juran/
13.  J. J. Plunkett & B. G. Dale, Quality costs: a critique of some ‘economic cost of quality’ models, International Journal of Production Research, Volume 26, Issue 11, 1988, PP 2-3
14.  Cost of Quality, http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/cost-of-quality/overview/overview.html
15.  Juran’s 10 Steps to Quality Improvement, http://www.5squalityposters.com/blog/?p=99