Architect of Quality

Architect of Quality : The Autobiography of Dr. Joseph M. Juran

Book Reviews (Source: Amazon.com)

This is an excellent autobiography by one of the most renowned quality gurus in the world. His contributions to the field of quality management in his over 70 active working years is outstanding. Dr. Juran was the first to incorporate the human aspect of quality management which is referred to as Total Quality Management.

Among the quality management ideas and concepts for which Juran is well known include top management involvement, the Pareto principle, the need for widespread training in quality, the definition of quality as fitness for use, the project-by-project approach to quality improvement.

Juran was born in 1904 in Rumania. The family immigrated to the USA some few years later in search of the American dream and to escape poverty in their country. Young Juran was a gifted scholar with special aptitudes for mathematic and science. In 1920, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota. By 1925, he had received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He worked at the Western Electric Company in the Inspection Department of the famous Hawthorne Works in Chicago. This was a huge and complex factory, manned by 40,000 workers. This presented Juran with his first challenge in management.

Juran was one of two engineers for the Inspection Statistical Department, one of the first of such divisions created in American industry.

By 1937, Juran was the chief of Industrial Engineering at Western Electric in New York. His work involved visiting other companies and discussing methods of quality management. During WWII, Juran served in Washington, D.C. as an assistant administrator for the Lend-Lease Administration. He and his team improved the efficiency of the process, eliminating excessive paperwork and thus hastening the arrival of supplies to the USA allies. Juran finally left Washington in 1945 and chose to devote the remainder of his life to the study of quality management.

Juran became Chairman of the Department of Administrative Engineering at New York University (NYU), where he taught for many years. He also created a thriving consulting practice, and wrote books and delivered lectures for American Management Association (AMA). It was his time with NYU and the AMA which allowed for the development of his management philosophies which are now embedded in the foundation of American and Japanese management. His classic book, the Quality Control Handbook, first released in 1951, is widely used reference work for quality managers.

This is an excellent book that is highly recommended for managers as well as quality specialists.

Juran's Quality Handbook

Juran's Quality Handbook (McGraw-Hill International Editions: Industrial Engineering Series)

The newest methods in planning, control, and results, for successful quality engineering and management, written by an international group of recognized experts.

Book Review: QA bible for quality engineers

For decades Joseph Juran has been a famous name in the quality movement. He formed his own institute for quality and has for many years edited an extensive volume on methods for improving quality in manufacturing processes. This Quality Handbook, now in its fifth edition has long been the basic reference for quality engineers and statistician alike. To honor Juran, the fifth edition is titled Juran's Quality Handbook. The volume is now over 900 pages and consists of 48 chapters and 5 appendices. There are 53 authors including Juran himself and his colleague and co-editor Blanton Godfrey. Many other well-known persons have contributed. It includes a chapter on government services by Vice President Al Gore. Prominent statisticians who have contributed include Don Marquardt, Stu Hunter, Bill Meeker, Luis Escobar, Gerry Hahn, Ed Schilling, Ed Dudewicz and Necip Doganaksoy.

As a statistician, I particularly like having a wealth of practical statistical information and tables in one source. Dudewicz provides the introductory statistical material necessary to understand the four other statistical chapters that follow it (SPC by Wadsworth, Acceptance Sampling by Schilling, Design and Analysis of Experiments by Hunter and Reliability Concepts and Data Analysis by Meeker, Escobar, Doganaksoy and Hahn). These are all distinguished authors who are excellent writers and several have written whole text books on these subjects. This edition is up-to-date with the latest advances in quality techniques. Statistical advances in robust design (Taguchi methods), bootstrap methods, process control and capability are all included. Juran and Deming had major practical impact on the quality movement because they both emphasized the need for proper process management. This can be seen in many of the non-statistical chapters that deal with successful management techniques such as six sigma.

This edition is even better than the previous editions and is indeed worthy of the title of bible. Despite the high cost this book is prominent on my bookshelf. I recommend it to anyone heavily involved in product reliability, even if they own copies of previous editions!

"Juran's Quality Handbook" is an excellent book on Quality by one of the most well known quality gurus. The book gives a comprehensive coverage of the subject of quality management. It includes the latest techniques on quality as well as quality theories.

This is a very useful book for those who are interested in producing quality goods and services in a customer focused organization. This huge tome is of immense value to all those involved with the quality profession and is an excellent reference book that covers the wide range of topics and subjects pertaining to quality.

This is a well written book that is very useful for all businesses where quality matters (that is, all businesses). This should be essential reading for quality specialists such as control and quality assurance personnel.

Juran on Quality by Design

The New Steps for Planning Quality into Goods and Services

Juran on Quality by Design: The New Steps for Planning Quality into Goods and Services

Book Reviews (Source: Amazon.com)

Juran on Quality by Design offers a look into the thinking by members of the Juran Institute on the means to deliver quality products and services through a customer focused planning process. This latest Juran book is actually a replacement and expansion of one of its predecessors, Juran on Planning for Quality (Free Press, 1988). The similarities between the two books is significant enough that this new book should have been promoted as the second edition of the first. The new title is much better aligned with the intent of the discussion contained, since the earlier title made the line management audience less obvious than required for the use of the procedures contained throughout the volume.

In Planning for Quality, Juran laid out a ten-step road map for the planning of new products to meet the explicit and known needs of the customer. Using a chapter-by-chapter approach that followed the road map step-by-step, Juran explained the overall process of designing quality into the product in a fashion that makes the work useful to both line staff chartered with implementing the processes and senior management who must provide the commitment and leadership that make it all work. As each step progressed, Juran built a spreadsheet that captured the necessary process and product data needed to provide traceability from customer needs through process controls and product quality control tests.

In Quality by Design, Juran has kept to the style and organization of the former work, but the process itself has matured during the four year gap. The revised process includes only six sequential steps: establish quality goals, identify those impacted (the customers), determine customers' needs, develop product features, develop process features, and establish process controls (transfer to operations).

A seventh step, apply measurement, now appears throughout the process and affects all six of the sequential steps. In Planning for Quality, measurement was the fifth of the ten sequential steps. Ongoing measurement is an important part of the maturation that Quality by Design has gone through.

Juran's spreadsheet has also matured from one very complicated spreadsheet, that actually became quite unmanageable, to a collection of four simpler spreadsheets that each coordinate a different view of the data collected, making the planning results easier to tie back to the process. The spreadsheets constitute the raw data output of the process. Juran describes the four spreadsheets as "the interlocking input-output chain, in which the output for any step becomes the input for the next step."

The first planning spreadsheet list customers down the rows, and customer needs across the columns. The second transfers those needs to the rows and adds product features as columns. The third moves product features to the rows and adds process features as columns. The fourth spreadsheet adds process control features as columns providing full traceability from the process controls implemented back to the original customers that drove the quality planning cycle. Those comfortable with matrices will recognize that these four spreadsheets represent a five dimensional structure of information about the customer and processes. In Planning for Quality, Juran had implemented these five dimensions in a single two dimensional spreadsheet and the result was unmanageable, making Quality by Design a significant improvement.

In addition to revising the earlier work, Quality by Design expands on many issues raised earlier with an additional 200 pages of discussions that affect the implementation of the planning process throughout the organization, and several major case studies that highlight the application of the process.

The chapter on "Strategic Quality Planning" offers insights on the application of the planning process to senior management and the creation of a quality culture within the organization. The chapters on "Departmental Quality Planning" and "Multifunctional Quality Planning" highlight the use of the process within the organization for inter-departmental or intra- departmental quality action. These closing chapters offer guidance on the application of Juran's planning process, making Quality by Design less theoretical sounding than its predecessor, Planning for Quality.

Professionals with my field of information technology should read Quality by Design. Even those individuals who have already read the previous Planning for Quality will find enough incremental value to justify the overlap. The question remains: How can the process described be applied within the IT function?

To start, the planning spreadsheets can be used to map out the requirements for any methodology and standards already in place within the department. To the extent that quality control is often difficult to sell within the development methodology, the spreadsheets help illustrate how the process controls inherent in the IT process support the requirements of IT customers. Likewise, the spreadsheets will point out any existing omissions in current IT practices that may result in dissatisfied customers. This self-assessment and diagnostic use of Juran's work can be done with relatively little effort and at low cost.

Second, and requiring more resource and commitment, Juran's process can be rolled into the current IT requirements definition process to improve the level of requirements being defined by IT projects. The deliverables may have to be mapped against Juran's spreadsheets, but the result will be an increased project focus on, not just data and processes, but also the controls that need to be built into the IT system to assure that the application can be validated and monitored over the long-term. The result will be the implementation not just of new application processes, but of processes that embed the concept of continuous improvement through control of the key variables directly traceable back to customer satisfaction.

That's what Juran on Quality by Design is all about!