Juran – The Father of Quality, Pareto, and perhaps Six Sigma

The field of quality management lost one of its founding fathers last week. Dr Joseph M Juran was a charismatic figure whose contributions helped shape the Quality function as we know it today. Juran’s contribution to the Quality field goes beyond statistics and equations. He helped define the terminology, methodologies and processes for the Quality field.

Juran’s Quality Handbook is the Quality Bible and his “trilogy” books (Juran on Leadership for Quality, Juran on Planning for Quality and Juran on Quality by Design) should be required reading for the Quality professional.

As an Industrial Engineer, I had to work with the very thick Juran’s Quality Handbook in college. I had worked through many of the statistics and exercises, but I never fully appreciated Juran’s contributions until recently.

Juran wanted us to see Quality as more than just inspecting and counting defects on the factory floor. We can see this in his broad definition of quality terms below like Fitness For User and Quality Function.

• Fitness for Use – the extent to which the product successfully serves the purposes of the user during usage. Parameters for Fitness for Use include: quality of design, quality of conformance, abilities, and field service. 

• Quality Function – the entire collection of activities through which we achieve fitness for use, no matter where these activities are performed.

In the 1940’s, Juran defined the Pareto principle―the principle of the vital few and the trivial many. In general, the principle states that by tackling the top 20% of the issues we can address 80% of the cost of poor quality. This concept is critical to focusing improvement projects on the areas that will have the bigger impact, but the Pareto principle can be applied to many things.

The function of the Inspector might be as old as the pyramids of Egypt, but the Quality Control function as we know it today was defined during the World War II years.

Juran was a pioneer in Customer Satisfaction and Total Quality Management. He understood that the Customer and the Manufacturer have very different views of product quality and cost. In more recent years, our views of Total Cost of Ownership are starting to align with the Customer’s view.

Fool-proof the process if possible, train and empower the operators as much as possible, and put standards in place. Humans are fallible, biased and at times inattentive; therefore we must have procedures in place to compensate for human error.

Juran also understood that we need to motivate people to take action and reduce errors. Motivation is driven by upper management communications and campaigns for quality. Even though, he did not believe in the general premises of the Zero Defect philosophies of the early 1960’s, he did acknowledge that they had some positive results. The personal pledge was a good motivator. He also studied other incentive and motivational methods including the Japanese QC Circle, the USSR Saratov System and the Polish DO RO (Dobra Robota) System.

Juran spoke frankly about current quality practices. “Numerous specific quality crises and problems have been traced to the way in which quality was planned in the first place. In a sense, we planned it that way.”
• Quality professionals not involved early enough in the design process and we do not give Quality the importance it needs during product and process design.
• In many factories today, product designers are still developing new products, and then delivering the product specifications to the Manufacturing Department.
• With the advent of electronic systems, many companies proceeded to convert their manual systems directly into electronic systems without first getting rid of the deficiencies in the manual systems. As a result, their manual mess became an automated mess.
• Quality Planning has been done by amateurs. Process planners need to be trained to become professionals at quality planning.

Juran also stressed that upper management had to drive a Quality philosophy in the company.
• Quality must be a part of every agenda in the company.
• The business plan should contain quality goals.
• Each level must establish goals.
• Everyone must be trained.
• To establish and meet a goal, it must be measured…measure everything possible.
• Review progress.
• Give recognition for excellent achievements.

The legacy of this hard working immigrant will be with us for a long time. The Juran Institute will continue to promote the Quality field, and the next generation of Quality thought leaders are sure to be inspired by Juran’s life and work.

Other References on Juran:

New York Times: Joseph Juran, 103, Pioneer in Quality Control, Dies
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/03juran.html?ex=1362286800&en=ac0c70aadae138d9&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&

JMJuran.com An Immigrant’s Gift
http://www.jmjuran.com/

Juran Institute
http://www.juran.com/

Quality Lab – 100 Years of Juran
http://qlab.ieem.ust.hk/qlab/download/Juran%20100%20Years.pdf