Joseph M Juran

Rise to fame Juran's message

Rise to fame

Again 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.

His lectures were followed up at more junior management by JUSE and the Japanese Standards Association. Large companies started internal training, courses for foremen were offered on national radio, and booklets were even made available at newspaper kiosks.

Juran has had a varied career in management and his interest has been wider than just quality, having been concerned with the underlying principles common to all managerial activity. His 12 books have collectively been translated into some 13 languages. He has received more than 30 medals, honorary fellowships, etc in 12 countries. Like Deming, these include the highest decoration presented to a non-Japanese citizen, the Second Order of the Sacred Treasure.

Juran's message

His recent book Juran on Planning for Quality is perhaps the definitive 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; creating measurements of quality; planning processes capable of meeting 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 effects his concept of quality since one must also consider the 'fitness of use' of the interim product for the following internal customers. He illustrates this idea via the Quality Spiral.

Joseph 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.

[Fig] The Quality Spiral

According to Juran, the mission of his recent work is:

• Creating an awareness of the quality crisis of the 1980s

• Establishing a new approach to quality planning, and training

• Assisting companies to re-plan existing processes avoiding quality deficiencies

• Establishing mastery within companies over the quality planning process thus avoiding the creation of new chronic problems.

'The recipe for action should consist of 90% substance and 10% exhortation, not the reverse.'⁽³⁾

His formula for results is:

1. Establish specific goals to be reached.

2. Establish plans for reaching the goals.

3. Assign clear responsibility for meeting the goals.

4. Base the rewards on results achieved.

Dr Juran warns that there are no shortcuts to quality and is sceptical of companies that rush into applying Quality Circles, since he doubts their 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. Thus he claims that Philip Crosby's Zero Defects approach does not help, since it is mistakenly based on the idea that the bulk of quality problems arise because workers are careless and not properly motivated. 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.'

⁽³⁾ Juran on Planning for Quality 1988

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Last Revised: Fri Feb 13 11:58:34 1998