QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Quality management

Quality management

Juran Trilogy

Dr. Juran's trilogy defined the three management processes required by every organization to improve: Quality control, quality improvement and quality planning.

This Trilogy shows how an organization can improve every aspect by better understanding of the relationship between processes that plan, control and improve quality as well as business results. It was created in the 1950's and defines managing for quality as three basic quality-oriented, interrelated processes:

Quality Planning --- To determine customer needs and develop processes and products required to meet and exceed those of the customer needs. The processes are called Design for Six Sigma or Concurrent Engineering. This can be particularly challenging for a planning team, because customers are not always consistent with what they say they want. The challenge for quality planning is to identify the most important needs from all the needs expressed by the customer.

Identify who are the customers.

Determine the needs of those customers.

Translate those needs into our language.

Develop a product that can respond to those needs.

Optimize the product features so as to meet our needs and customer needs. (Lighter, 2008, p.265)

Quality Control --- The purposes of quality control is to ensure the process is running in optimal effectiveness, or to ensure that any level of chronic waste inherent in the process does not get worst. Chronic waste, which is a cost of poor quality that can exist in any process, may exist due to various factors including deficiencies in the original planning. It could cost a lot of money to the company, from rework time to scrap product to overdue receivables. If the waste does get worst (sporadic spike), a corrective action team is brought in to determine the cause or causes of this abnormal variation. Once the cause or causes had been determined and corrected, the process again falls into the zone defined by the “quality control” limits.

Prove that the process can produce the product under operating conditions with minimal inspection.

Transfer the process to Operations. (Donabedian, 2007, 233-234)

Strengths of Juran's Trilogy

The methodology searches a continuous improvement of quality in every aspects of the organization, because if the implementation of the methodology does not give the desire results it is possible to start all over again.

The methodology allows the use different quality tools to cover the steps of Juran's Trilogy. It allows a better understanding of the relationships of every stage of the company.

The methodology is well structured and allows the companies that implement it, an easy understanding and application.

Weaknesses of Juran's Trilogy

To have quality control it is necessary to have a trained person with knowledge in statistical processes or train a special person to be in charge of quality.

The program is focus in the company process and not in labor force.

Analyzing the requirements of the program we found that the companies who apply the program have a complex level of organization.

This kind of methodologies show results in a long term; this represents a risk for the company because the implementation of the ...