JURAN AND CROSBY ON QUALITY AND QUALITY IS FREE:Quality Planning

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Total Quality Management MGT510

Lesson # 16

JURAN AND CROSBY ON QUALITY AND QUALITY IS FREE

The Juran Philosophy and Trilogy

The Juran Trilogy® is a registered trademark of Juran Institute, Inc.

Quality

Improvement

Quality

Control

Quality

Planning

Juran taught quality principles to the Japanese in the 1950s just after Deming and was a principal force

in their quality reorganization. Like Deming, he concludes that we face a major crisis due to the loss of

sales to foreign competition and the huge costs of poor quality. To solve this crisis, new thinking about

quality that includes all levels of the managerial hierarchy is required. Upper management in particular

requires training and experience in managing for quality.

Juran's programs are designed to fit into a company's current strategic business planning with minimal

risk of rejection. This is in contrast to Deming who proposes sweeping cultural change. Juran contends

that employees at different levels of an organization speak in different "languages." (Deming believes

statistics should be the common language.)

Top management speaks in the language of dollars, workers speak in the language of things, and middle

management must be able to speak both languages and translate between dollars and things. Thus, to get

top management's attention, quality issues must be cast in the language they understand dollars.

Juran advocates the accounting and analysis of quality costs to focus attention on quality problems. At

the operational level, Juran's focus is on increasing conformance to specifications through elimination

of defects, supported extensively by statistical tools for analysis. Thus, his philosophy fits well into

existing management systems.

Juran defines quality as "fitness for use." (Deming advocates no specific definition.) This s broken

down into four categories: quality of design, quality of conformance, availability, and field service.

Quality of design focuses on market research, the product concept, and design specifications. Quality of

conformance includes technology, manpower, and management Availability focuses on reliability,

Total Quality Management MGT510

maintainability, and logistical support. Field service quality comprises promptness, competence, and

integrity.

Juran views the pursuit of quality on two levels: (1) the mission of the firm as whole is to achieve high

product quality, and (2) the mission of each individual department in the firm is to achieve high

production quality. Like Deming, Juran advocates a never-ending spiral of activities that includes

market research, product development, design, planning for manufacture, purchasing, production

process control, and inspection and testing, followed by customer feedback. Because of the

interdependence of these functions, the need for competent company-wide quality management is great.

Senior management must play an active and enthusiastic leadership role in the quality management

process.

Juran's prescriptions focus on three major aspects of quality called the Quality Trilogy.

Quality planning the process for preparing to met quality goals,

Quality control the process for meeting quality goals during operations, and

Quality improvement the process for breaking through to unprecedented levels of performance.

Quality planning begins with identifying customers, both external and internal, determining their needs,

and developing product features that respond to customer needs.

Quality control involves determining what to control, establishing units of measurement so that data

may be objectively evaluated, establishing standards of performance, measuring actual performance,

interpreting the difference between actual performance and the standard, and taking action on the

difference.

Juran's program for quality improvement involves demonstrating the need for improvement, identifying

specific projects for improvement, organizing to guide the projects, diagnosing the causes, providing

remedies for the causes, proving that the remedies are effective under operating conditions, and

providing control to hold improvements.

Quality Planning:

Quality planning involves developing the products, systems, and process

needed to meet or exceed customer expectations. The following steps are required:

Determine who the customers are.

Identify customers' needs.

Develop products with features that respond to customer needs.

Develop systems and processes that allow the organization to produce these features.

Deploy the plans to operational levels.

Quality Control:

The control of quality involves the following processes:

Assess actual quality performance.

Compare performance with goals.

Act on differences between performance and goals.

Quality Improvement: The improvement of quality should be ongoing continual:

Develop the infrastructure necessary to make annual quality improvements.

Identify specific areas in need of improvement, and implement improvement projects.

Establish a project team with responsibility for completing each improvement project.

Provide teams with what they need to be able to diagnose problems to determine root causes

develop solutions, and establish control that will maintain gains made.

Total Quality Management MGT510

Juran's assessment of most companies is that quality control is far and away the top priority among the

trilogy and most companies feel they are strong in this category. Quality planning and quality

improvement, however, are not important priorities and are significantly weaker in most organizations.

He feels that more effort needs to be placed on quality planning and even more on quality improvement.

Japanese efforts at quality improvement were supported by massive training programs and top

management leadership. Training in managerial quality-oriented concepts as well as training in the tools

for quality improvement, cost reduction, data collection, and analysis is one of the most important

components of Juran's philosophy. Juran maintains that the Japanese experience leaves little doubt as to

the significance of the return on quality training in competitive advantage, reduced failure costs, higher

productivity, smaller inventories, and better delivery performance.

Crosby's Philosophy and Contributions

Philip B. Crosby started his career in quality later than Deming and Juran. His corporate background

includes 14 years as director of quality at ITT (1965-1979). He left ITT in 1979 to form Philip Crosby

Associates, an international consulting firm on quality improvement, which he ran until 1992, when he

retired as CEO to devote his time to lecturing on quality related issues.

Crosby, who defines quality simply as conformance to customer requirements, is best known for his

advocacy of zero defects management and prevention as opposed to statistically acceptable levels of

quality. He is also known for his work on Costs of Quality, Quality is Free and Crosby's Fourteen Steps

to Quality Improvement.

The essence of Crosby's quality philosophy is embodied in what he calls the Absolutes of Quality

Management and the Basic Elements of Improvement..

Crosby's Absolutes of Quality Management are as follows:

Quality means conformance to requirements not elegance. Crosby dispels the myth that quality is

simply a feeling of "excellence." Requirements must be clearly stated so that they cannot be

misunderstood. Requirements are communication devices and are ironclad. Once a task is done, one

can take measurements to determine conformance to requirements. The nonconformance detected is

the absence of quality. Quality problems become nonconformance problems that is, variation in

output. Setting requirements is the responsibility of management.

There is no such thing as a quality problem. Problems must be identified by the individuals or

departments that cause them. There are accounting problems, manufacturing problems, design

problems, front-desk problems, and so on. Quality originates in functional departments, not in the

quality department, and the burden of responsibility for such problems lies with the functional

departments. The quality department should measure conformance, report results, and lead the drive

to develop a positive attitude toward quality improvement. This is similar to number 3 of Deming's

Points.

There is no such thing as the economics of quality: it is always cheaper to do the job right the first

time. Crosby supports the premise that "economics of quality" has no meaning. Quality is free.

What costs money are all the actions that involve not doing jobs right the first time. The Deming

Chain Reaction provides a similar message.

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