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!

Quality Management Evolution

Quality management is a recent phenomenon. Advanced civilizations that supported the arts and crafts allowed clients to choose goods meeting higher quality standards than normal goods. In societies where art and craft (and craftsmanship) were valued, one of the responsibilities of a master craftsman (and similarly for artists) was to lead their studio, train and supervise the work of their craftsmen and apprentices. The master craftsman set standards, reviewed the work of others and ordered rework and revision as necessary. One of the limitations of the craft approach was that relatively few goods could be produced, on the other hand an advantage was that each item produced could be individually shaped to suit the client. This craft based approach to quality and the practices used were major inputs when quality management was created as a management science.
During the industrial revolution, the importance of craftsmen was diminished as mass production and repetitive work practices were instituted. The aim was to produce large numbers of the same goods. The first proponent in the US for this approach was Eli Whitney who proposed (interchangeable) parts manufacture for muskets, hence producing the identical components and creating a musket assembly line. The next step forward was promoted by several people including Frederick Winslow Taylor a mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He is sometimes called "the father of scientific management." He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and part of his approach laid a further foundation for quality management, including aspects like standardization and adopting improved practices. Henry Ford also was important in bringing process and quality management practices into operation in his assembly lines. In Germany, Karl Friedrich Benz, often called the inventor of the motor car, was pursuing similar assembly and production practices, although real mass production was properly initiated in Volkswagen after world war two. From this period onwards, North American companies focused predominantly upon production against lower cost with increased efficiency.
Walter A. Shewhart made a major step in the evolution towards quality management by creating a method for quality control for production, using statistical methods, first proposed in 1924. This became the foundation for his ongoing work on statistical quality control. W. Edwards Deming later applied statistical process control methods in the United States during World War II, thereby successfully improving quality in the manufacture of munitions and other strategically important products.
Quality leadership from a national perspective has changed over the past five to six decades. After the second world war, Japan decided to make quality improvement a national imperative as part of rebuilding their economy, and sought the help of Shewhart, Deming and Juran, amongst others. W. Edwards Deming championed Shewhart's ideas in Japan from 1950 onwards. He is probably best known for his management philosophy establishing quality, productivity, and competitive position. He has formulated 14 points of attention for managers, which are a high level abstraction of many of his deep insights. They should be interpreted by learning and understanding the deeper insights and include:
Break down barriers between departments
Management should learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership
Improve constantly
Institute a programme of education and self-improvement
In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese goods were synonymous with cheapness and low quality, but over time their quality initiatives began to be successful, with Japan achieving very high levels of quality in products from the 1970s onward. For example, Japanese cars regularly top the J.D. Power customer satisfaction ratings. In the 1980s Deming was asked by Ford Motor Company to start a quality initiative after they realized that they were falling behind Japanese manufacturers. A number of highly successful quality initiatives have been invented by the Japanese (see for example on this page: Taguchi, QFD, Toyota Production System. Many of the methods not only provide techniques but also have associated quality culture (i.e. people factors). These methods are now adopted by the same western countries that decades earlier derided Japanese methods.
Customers recognize that quality is an important attribute in products and services. Suppliers recognize that quality can be an important differentiator between their own offerings and those of competitors (quality differentiation is also called the quality gap). In the past two decades this quality gap has been greatly reduced between competitive products and services. This is partly due to the contracting (also called outsourcing) of manufacture to countries like India and China, as well internationalization of trade and competition. These countries amongst many others have raised their own standards of quality in order to meet International standards and customer demands. The ISO 9000 series of standards are probably the best known International standards for quality management.
There are a huge number of books available on quality. In recent times some themes have become more significant including quality culture, the importance of knowledge management, and the role of leadership in promoting and achieving high quality. Disciplines like systems thinking are bringing more holistic approaches to quality so that people, process and products are considered together rather than independent factors in quality management.
The influence of quality thinking has spread to non-traditional applications outside of walls of manufacturing, extending into service sectors and into areas such as sales, marketing and customer service[1].