Joseph Juran
Like Deming, Dr Joseph Juran was a charismatic figure. A Balkan-born
American, Joseph Juran started out as an engineer in 1924. In 1951 his first Quality
Control Handbook was published and led him to international eminence. Chapter 1 of the
book was titled The Economics of Quality and contained his now famous analogy to the costs
of quality; there is gold in the mine.
Like Deming, Juran was invited to Japan in the early 1950s by the Union of
Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE). He arrived in 1954 and conducted seminars for
top and middle-level executives. His lectures had a strong managerial flavour and focused
on planning, organisational issues, management's responsibility for quality, and the need
to set goals and targets for improvement. He emphasised that quality control should be
conducted as an integral part of management control.
Juran's message
There are many aspects to Juran's message on quality. Intrinsic is the
belief that quality does not happen by accident, it must be planned. His book Juran
on Planning for Quality (Free Press 1988) is the guide to Juran's current thoughts and his
structured approach to company-wide quality planning. His earlier Quality Control
Handbook was much more technical in nature.
Juran sees quality planning as part of the quality trilogy
of quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. The key elements in
implementing company-wide strategic quality planning are in turn seen as identifying
customers and their needs; establishing optimal quality goals under operating conditions;
and producing continuing results in improved market share, premium prices, and a reduction
of error rates in the office and factory.
Juran's Quality Planning Road Map consists of the following steps:
1) Identify who are the customers.
2) Determine the needs of those customers.
3) Translate
those needs into our language.
4) Develop a product that can respond to those needs.
5) Optimise the product features so as to meet our needs as well as
customer needs.
6) Develop a process which is able to produce the product.
7) Optimise the process.
8) Prove that the process can produce the product under operating
conditions.
9) Transfer the process to operations.
Juran concentrates not just on the end customer, but identifies other
external and internal customers. This affects his concept of quality since one must also
consider the fitness for use of the interim product for the following internal customers.
Juran's work emphasises the need for specialist knowledge and tools for
successful conduct of the Quality Function. He emphasises the need for continuous
awareness of the customer in all functions.
According to Juran, the mission of his recent work is:
· Creating an awareness of the
quality crisis of the 1980s, the role of quality planning in that crisis and the need to
revise the approach to quality thinking.
· Establishing a new approach to
quality planning and providing training in how to plan for quality using this new
approach.
· Assisting companies to re-plan
existing processes throughout the company which contain unacceptable quality deficiencies.
· Establishing mastery within
companies over the quality planning process and utilising this to plan for quality in ways
that avoid the creation of new chronic problems.
Juran refers to the widespread move to raise quality awareness in
the emerging quality crisis of the early 1980s as failing to change behaviour
despite company quality awareness campaigns, or drives, based on slogans and exhortations.
Whilst quality awareness was raised, the increased awareness seldom resulted in changed
behaviour.
The recipe for action should consist of 90% substance and 10% exhortation,
not the reverse.
(Juran on Planning for Quality 1988)
His formula for results is:
Establish specific goals to be reached
Establish plans for reaching the goals
Assign clear responsibility for meeting the goals
Base the rewards on results achieved
Dr Juran warns that there are no shortcuts to quality. He is
sceptical of companies that (following other quality gurus) rush into applying Quality
Circles, since he doubts their likely effectiveness in the West. He believes that the majority
of quality problems are the fault of poor management, rather than poor workmanship on the
shop-floor. In general, he believes that management controllable defects account
for over 80% of the total quality problems.
Juran believes that, as with Japanese industry, long-term training to
improve quality should start at the top, but he knows that this irritates senior
management.
Their instinctive belief is that upper managers already know what needs to
be done, and that training is for others - the workforce, the supervision, the engineers.
It is time to re-examine this belief. |
