Q2. Discuss in brief the philosophies of Deming and Juran and do the comparative assessment of the two.
Ans. As globally industries become increasingly more concerned about quality as a competitive advantage, the question of defining a term as inherently subjective as quality becomes more and more contentious. Many managers operate on the "I know it when I see it" principle; however, a growing awareness exists that in order to have a quality product or service, there must be some consensus on what quality is. Since the early 1980's, a not-so-quiet revolution has been occurring in American business, a revolution of ideas about doing business which has largely (but not exclusively) been spearheaded by three individuals: Phillip Crosby, W. Edwards Deming, and Joseph Juran.
Deming’s 14 points for transformation of a Business
1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.
2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul as well as supervision of production workers.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
11.a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
11.b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
12.a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
12.b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual merit rating and of management by objective.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.
Juran’s Triology
The underlying concept of quality trilogy is that managing for quality consists of three basic quality-oriented processes:
· Quality planning.
· Quality control.
· Quality improvement.
Each of these processes is universal; it is carried out by an unvarying sequence of activities.
1. Quality Planning:
Identify the customers both external and internal.
Determine customer needs.
Develop product features that respond to customer needs. (Products include both goods and services.)
Establish quality goals that meet the needs of customers and suppliers alike, and do so at a minimum combined cost.
Develop a process that can produce the needed product features.
Prove process capability—prove that the process can meet the quality goals under operating conditions.
2. Quality Control:
Choose control subjects — what to control.
Choose units of measurement.
Establish measurement.
Establish standards of performance.
Measure actual performance.
Interpret the difference (actual versus standard).
Take action on the difference.
3. Quality Improvement:
Prove the need for improvement.
Identify specific projects for improvement.
Organize to guide the projects.
Organize for diagnosis—for discovery of causes.
Diagnose to find the causes.
Provide remedies.
Prove that the remedies are effective under operating conditions.
Provide for control to hold the gains.
While many people are of the opinion that the ideas of these three men may differ, it is the purpose of this paper to show that Deming and Juran both define quality in the same terms, albeit from different perspectives: the user and the manufacturer.
THE USER’S PERSPECTIVE: DEMING
The problem of defining quality is so important to Deming that he devotes an entire chapter of his landmark book, Out of the Crisis, to doing just that. In Deming’s view, the consumer is by necessity the most important part of the production system: without a consumer, there is no reason to produce. The question then becomes one of what the consumer needs (or what the consumer thinks he needs or wants). The consumer is not, as Deming points out, always the one who pays the final bill: one or more middlemen may exist between the producer and the person actually paying for the product or service. The consumer is simply the end user of whatever product or service is being supplied. Deming cites one important example of where this distinction is frequently lost in an anecdote regarding the review of elementary school readers produced by a publishing house. When one of the reviewers protested that the stories were horribly bland and uninteresting, the company vice-president in charge of textbooks responded that, although he agreed, he was obliged to keep in mind that neither teachers nor students at that level bought textbooks. The sale had to be made to school boards and superintendents. Likewise, Deming also remarks that assessing the quality of medical care offered by a practitioner or institution is similarly difficult: because insurance companies rather than patients spend the majority of the money spent on health care, and because many medical professionals and institutions see research rather than patient care as their ultimate purpose, the priorities of many practitioners have become skewed.
To Deming, the only meaningful definition of quality is that which the consumer specifies. A product could meet every possible technical specification and be offered at an appropriate price, but if it is the wrong product, it is worthless to the consumer. However, Deming also argues that quality has a short-term and a long-term component. It is important to anticipate the consumer’s future needs as well as those of the present in order to continue to meet the consumer’s definition of quality and maintain a competitive advantage. It is at this point that Deming introduces his Continuous Improvement Helix, an outgrowth of the famous Deming Cycle (Plan, Do, Study/Check, Act):
1. Design the product.
2. Make it; test it in the production line and the laboratory.
3. Put it on the market.
4. Test it in service; find out what the user thinks of it, and why the nonuser has not bought it.
According to Deming, these four steps, repeated continuously, will result in increasing quality at a decreasing price. Thus, the conditions for quality as seen by the consumer are met: a knowledge of what the consumer needs at the present time, the ability to meet that need, and the ability to anticipate the future needs of the consumer.
THE MANUFACTURER’S PERSPECTIVE: JURAN
Like Deming, Juran also sees quality as a concept which can only be usefully defined by the consumer. Strictly put, Juran defines quality as "fitness for use." Under this heading, Juran goes on further to quantify "fitness for use" in two different categories:
1. Product features that meet customer needs.
2. Freedom from deficiencies.
To achieve the first objective, Juran, like Deming, proposes that the producer learn what the customer expects from the product. In many cases, this also includes determining who the end customer really is. At this point, the task is to translate the customer demands into the desired production specifications and features, and come up with a coherent plan to produce them.
The second objective is achieved through measuring the results of production and how well-received the product is in the marketplace. By comparing the actual results with the desired results, acting on deficiencies and providing feedback into the system, continuous improvement can be attained. These three activities - quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement - are known as the Juran Trilogy.
Like the Deming Cycle, the Juran Trilogy is intended to be seen as an endless feedback loop, although Juran takes the concept further and explores the practicalities of implementing such a system for any given operation, be it service or manufacturing-related. Whereas Deming sees quality problems as a result of poor understanding of an existing system, Juran is of the opinion that proper planning of a system in the beginning can help the producer avoid unnecessary rework and hidden quality costs.
Juran sees the problem as being essentially that of strategy vs. tactics: quality strategy (the "Big Q" as Juran puts it) being the outlook of senior management and the organization as a whole, and quality tactics (the "Little Q") being the day-to-day operations of line workers and supervisors who are mainly concerned with individual tasks. In Juran’s view, too much emphasis in the quality disciplines has been placed on the "Little Q" at the expense of the "Big Q". Like Deming, Juran proposes a paradigm shift to reconcile this disparity; however, Juran also contends that the shift is already taking place and can be accomplished within traditional management structures.
| Sl No. | JURAN | DEMING |
| 1. | Juran provided an analytical approach to managing for quality. | Deming provided a new and comprehensive theory for managing organisations and human enterprises. |
| 2. | Juran saw production as a system of interrelationships between consumer research, design, suppliers, materials, production, assembly and inspection. | Deming provided advice on quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. |
| 3. | Juran prescribed how to manage quality functions. | Deming described a systematic view of the organisation. |
| 4. | Juran was a practitioner who desired to teach people better management practices. | Deming was a philosopher who desired to provide a new way to view the world. |
| 5. | Juran tends to appeal to the practical mind. | Deming’s works tends to appeal to theoretical minded individuals. |
| 6. | Juran focused on product improvement and service conformance by reducing uncertainty and manufacturing processes variations. | Deming focused on frequency as a controlling factor: Plan, Do, Check, Act. |
| 7. | Juran is identified for “fitness of quality”. Quality of design, quality of conformance, availability and competence. | Deming advocated an extensive use of statistical and control charts identify two sources of variation: common cause and special cause. |
CONCLUSION
While all three major quality leaders have their own ideas on how quality should be measured and managed, it is clear that Deming, Juran, and Crosby all point in the same direction. Deming’s assertion that the customer be the one who determines whether or not quality exists in a product or service, Juran’s bipartite definition of quality, and Crosby’s tacit "conformance to requirements" definition all insist on the customer being the final arbiter of what quality is or is not with respect to a particular product or service. All three insist on there being some tangible definition of quality, though with varying degrees of rigor. And all three see the importance of feedback in any mechanism designed to measure and manage quality: Deming’s Continuous Improvement Helix, the Juran Trilogy, and Crosby’s Price of Non-Conformance are all feedback mechanisms designed to answer one question: is the product performing in the marketplace as expected? If not, why not?
The difference, as stated before, lies mainly in perspective. Deming’s perspective is customer-driven and relies heavily on market research to determine what the customer will define as a quality product or service. Juran’s, while not independent of the marketplace, is more engineering-driven, designed to translate the customer’s vision of quality into that which can be produced. Crosby’s perspective transcends both of these, taking the high-road view of management: how one achieves quality is less important at the upper management level than whether or not the goals of quality are being met, and at what cost.
To conclude, while one might at first glance think that Deming, Juran, and Crosby have different approaches to the management of quality, in the final analysis all three insist on the same basic principles. As Crosby aptly pointed out, the main difference lies in the perspective one takes. While an inherently subjective term such as quality can easily take on a multitude of definitions, it is clear that these three leaders of the quality movement are pointing in the same direction.
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