Juran - A Century of Influence

20 July 2004 | Source: Business Standard
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Quality is an idea; it changes with time. Quality is a perception, it is a moving target. At the start of the twentieth century, quality implied an essential goodness of nature (an object of great quality), or a high grade of manufacture (high - quality goods). In both interpretations, higher quality cost more. Fifty years later, quality escaped its burden of luxury and was Ii be ruled from its association with high cost. It emerged as a classless idea that emphasized precision and accuracy, reliability, usefulness. and a positive response from those who experienced the goods and services. As the world entered the twenty-first century, the idea of quality took on a more substantial global meaning It is no longer restricted in its interpretation to be a structured methodology for improvement and cost reduction primarily of industrial products and business services. We now aim to apply quality to improve entire systems: organizations, educational systems, healthcare systems, the environment, governments, and national cultures. This book is dedicated to one of those quality proponents, Dr Joseph Moses Juran If there were a quality pantheon Dr Juran would be a charter member. Professor William Edwards Deming and Dr Walter A Shewhart would stand beside him. According to me, Dr Juran is distinguished by the breadth and depth of his knowledge, the clarity of his ideas, the demystification of concepts, the structure of his methods, and his extraordinary longevity as a major contributor to the field of quality. Dr Juran provided the most precise and applicable definition of the elusive phenomenon we call quality: fitness for use. He defined three universal sequences of action steps: one for achieving breakthrough, one for achieving control, and one for quality by design. We call these sequences, collectively, The Juran Trilogy. He articulated tile Pareto Principle, Which suggests that a small percentage of factors in any situation will yield a large percentage of tile effect. And for over sixty years, Dr Juran has tirelessly argued that a supportive organizational structure and management commitment are essential to the achievement of a habit of quality improvement.

Dr Juran’s remarkable story began at the turn of the twentieth century in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. He was born on 24 December 1904 in Braila, and grew up in Gurahumora, a tiny village with mud streets and houses with dirt floors, a place that Dr Juran grimly jokes, “had no quality problems.” In August 1912, the Jurans boarded the ship Mount Temple to America, with some trepidation: the Titanic had sunk in April of that year. From age 12 to age 16, Dr Juran held more jobs than most people hold in a lifetime. He worked as a packer, an errand boy, an office boy, a shipping clerk, a bundle boy, a shoe salesman, house wrecker, and a printer’s helper. Dr Juran was an able student at the University of Minnesota, but not outstanding. He might have achieved better grades, but two factors intervened. One was work, which consumed most of his nonclass hours.

Tuitions, after all, stood at $25 per semester. The other factor which he had not anticipated was chess. Consumed by the game, he went on to win the university chess championship. It was tit Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, one of the great factories of the age, that Dr Juran’s Life-work began to crystallize. “The Bell System was at that time facing some massive quality problems which its sister industries were not to face until decades later” he wrote, “a bewilderingly complex system; unprecedented interchangeability of mechanical apparatus and electrical circuitry; extremely close tolerances of manufacture and measurement; severe requirements for reliability and maintainability,” There was far more possibility of error and variation in the manufacture of telephone equipment than in the other major products of the day: textiles, ships, steel, locomotives, agricultural machinery, electric engines and automobiles. As the sole supplier of telephone equipment to the burgeoning Bell System, the problem of ensuring quality fell squarely on the shoulders of Western Electric and its major plant, The Hawthorne Works. Dr Juran’s knowledge of the Hawthorne operations, combined with his analytical skills, youthful energy, ferocious capacity for work, and tremendous drive to succeed, caused him to question the prevailing inspection method early in his career. He realized that his activities provided only short-term fixes to short-term problems and had absolutely no effect on the system. He went up the corporate ladder at a rapid pace. Then in a dramatic turn of events, Dr Juran was given the chance to put his innovative skills and ideas to use in an integral part of the Lend-Lease Administration effort in World War II. The immense and urgent undertaking allowed Dr Juran to throw himself into the fight against the Nazis. The post-war period afforded Dr Juran the opportunity to reflect on his experiences. culminating in the publication of “Juran's Quality Control Handbook”, world renowned as a “sacred text” on the subject of quality. During this time, he formulated the concepts that would establish his reputation. In 1952, Professor Deming, a consultant to the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), sent them a copy of Juran’s Quality Control Handbook. Consequently, at the invitation of JUSE, Dr Juran arrived in Tokyo on 4 July 1954. His lectures to the Japanese were well-organized and precise. Much of the material was based on the Handbook; the ideas were well supported by case examples. For several years. Thereafter his ideas had an Impact  on his clients in industrial Japan. The Juran Institute was established in 1979 in Connecticut. The first offering from the Institute, Juran on Quality Improvement, a 16 tape video series was a major commercial success. Qimpro Consultants was appointed as the Indian affiliate of the Juran Institute in 1987.

Dr Juran believes that all chronic problems that we face today - environmental pollution, to governmental waste and inefficiency, to declining standards of education and healthcare can be solved through quality management. We can gain control over any process, provoke breakthrough, and organize for continuous improvement.

CREDITS: Indian Merchants Chamber
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