The author Suresh Lulla, is the founder of Qimpro Consultants who has been spearheading the application of Juran Quality principles in different segments of the Indian industry. Qimpro Consultants has also been conducting seminars and workshops on Juran methodology and advising companies on “The Juran Trilogy” consisting of quality planning, quality control and quality improvement.
The book consists of studies made on the application of this methodology in a variety of industries and is a compilation of the studies made by leaders of different organisations on their quality endeavor.
The book is aimed to guide executives to build world quality products and services at affordable costs and is divided into six sections. Four sections in the book cover important requirements of quality movement and these are: leadership, education and training, skills and tools, and environmental inputs.
The book starts with the chapter entitled “World Class Quality” by the author himself. While India has been the birth place of several inventions few centuries ago, the country started trailing after the industrial revolution unable to face competition from Europe. With the opening up of Indian economy in recent years, developing products of high quality at low cost has become extremely important for survival. The author gives an introduction to COPQ and to different quality methodologies, discusses requirements to become a quality organisation, describes the International Quality Maturity Model, importance of making internationally competitive products and services.
Some Indian companies have risen to the occasion and producing world class quality products but the quality culture has to pervade more. Leadership plays an important role in any quality movement. This aspect is discussed in the second section with articles by eight leaders who share their experiences: J J Irani on the culture change he brought about in Tata Steel, P C Mohan on application of Juran Methodology in improving quality in Punjab Tractors, F C Kohli on his experiences in building TCS as a world class organisation, Deepak Mittal of A V Birla Group on quality initiatives in Thailand, S Srinivasan on his work at Thai Carbon Black for the Deming Prize, Deepak Parekh on building HDFC as a customer focused organisation, Steve Forte on his experiences in Jet Airways, Nadeem Mustafa Khan on his experiences on improving healthcare at Aga Khan University Hospital. The studies contained in the eight chapters will undoubtedly help the readers in quality journey in their respective industry.
Education and training plays an important role in improving the quality. The section three of the book dealing with this aspect contains articles by Bill Wortman on ASQ Professional Certification, Arvind Kudchadker on the aspect of quality in education, R H G Rau on creating passion for human excellence, Ganesh Natarjan and Uma Ganesh on the role of IT in quality education.
The section on “Critical Focus for World Class Quality” stresses on the basic necessities, planning and understanding of tools for achieving world class quality generally found lacking in most organisations. This section contain views of Hannan Ezekiel on Strategic Planning, David Hutchins on root cause analysis for better project management, Walter Vieira on customer satisfaction, R V Ramachandran on Reliability Engineering, Navin Dedhia and Hans Bajaria on knowledge management.
The section on Environmental Inputs for World Class Quality contains articles by Ashok Balwani and A Venkataram on integrating quality and safety standard. The article by Bittu Sahgal stresses the importance of supplementing environmental issues along with increase in industrial productivity.
The last chapter by the author on Quality Leadership discusses traits essential in a leader to achieve quality breakthroughs and describes the action points for top/senior managers to build a quality culture.
The book can undoubtedly serve as a good reference handbook to quality practitioners interested in applying Juran methodology and also to quality professionals interested in developing quality culture in different industries. The experiences described in the book particularly in section two can be extremely educative and helpful.
But the book contains references only to industries associated with Qimpro Consultants and involved in application of Juran Methodology and does not cover a large spectrum of Indian industry who have embarked on quality journey using other methodologies. The experiences described in the book is not complete because besides the organisations described in the book, there are several organisations who have achieved or on the way of achieving world class quality.
CREDITS: Dr Anirban Basu The author is Director, Quality+