Quality, for companies, must be more than a quality control department, it must be a corporate management philosophy.
Juran's sentence is clear: quality is nothing new. Although it was believed that the Japanese, influenced by men like Deming and Juran, established the principles of business quality management in the mid-20th century, more than 5000 years ago the Egyptians already inspected the pyramids to detect faults in his design.
Juran points out that despite how elemental and fundamental quality is for any company, it was the Orientals who took the trouble to incorporate it as a management philosophy at the highest management levels, while in the West, especially in the The United States, until a few years ago there was awareness of the importance it has for good corporate performance beyond financial reasons. In the West, the task of ensuring quality was left to a special department that focuses on the inspection of the finished product but not on a total monitoring of the entire production or servuction process as the case may be.
The importance of Juran's thinking lies in his belief that there are more factors that influence quality than post-testing the product for defects, emphasizing the human side.
What he wanted to communicate is that instead of waiting for the products to be finished to proceed to find the defects, the entire production process should be analyzed with the aim of preventing instead of correcting, in addition, his thinking is oriented towards not Quality delegation, but quality must be given by autonomy, each employee, from the manager to the plant staff, must have quality as a goal in what they do, individually and in teams, this is known as self-supervision.
Juran's approach is novel due to the incorporation of the human element in its theories, in addition to focusing on the needs of the client, an idea that is still considered revolutionary today and that, in fact, only a few years ago was really applied by companies.
Juran, in his book "Planning for Quality" says, about quality planning, "in general terms, quality planning is about developing the products and processes necessary to meet customer needs." This planning encompasses three basic activities:
- Identification of the client and their needs. Development of a product that responds to those needs. Development of a process capable of producing that product / service.
In addition, it states that quality planning can be obtained by following these steps:
- Identify who the customers are Determine the needs of the identified customers Translate those needs into the language of the company Optimize the characteristics of the product (service) to meet the needs of the customer and the company Develop a process capable of producing the product Optimize the process Demonstrate that the process can produce the product in operating conditions Transfer the process to the productive forces
Like Deming's fourteen points, these 8 steps seem very simple, but behind them there is much more, these are just guidelines and only when wanting to plan quality in a company, will the importance of them be noticed.
As Juran noted, quality planning cannot depend on a department, if the eight steps are repaired, it is evident that these cannot be executed by that department in isolation but that the entire organization must move in pursuit of achieving the one hundred percent customer satisfaction, that's what quality is all about after all.
