Juran Trilogy: Its Role in Improving Operation Quality

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Juran Trilogy: Its Role in Improving Operation Quality

The need for quality is innate in just about everyone. When you go shopping, you look for the product with the best standards. Even when looking to save money, you should still prefer your purchase to be of decent quality. Some consumers are even willing to pay more than the average cost for better performance. 

That demand for quality is what should drive every business. Whatever industry you are in, your company processes, projects and systems should be designed to give consumers what they want and need. 

Organisations use various tools and methodologies to boost quality, and the Juran Trilogy is one of them. Also called the Quality Trilogy, the framework provides a foundation that enterprises can employ to create products that are fit for use.

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What is Juran Trilogy

Juan Trilogy is a way to manage a quality improvement cycle aimed at reducing the cost of poor quality products/ services by planning quality into the whole process. Juran sets out a process to enable you to focus on quality management and best practices to produce the best possible results for your customer.

The core focus is quality, when creating or producing products/services it is critical to ensure they are fit for the purpose they are created for. Juran based everything around three core processes. 

What are the three aspects of Juran’s trilogy? The concept is based on three business processes that need to be balanced:

Quality Planning, Quality by Design QbD: Designing for quality to advance products and process quality.

Quality Control  (QC):  Process reviews every aspect involved in production from process control to Regulatory requirements. Procedures that adhere to a standard set of quality criteria concerned with identifying defects. Don’t confuse with Quality assurance (QA) which is about the prevention of defects.

Quality Improvement (process control and regulation): Continuous Improvement using Lean methodologies and Six Sigma. Removing all failure points is the purpose of quality improvement.

Juran Trilogy Redefined Quality Management

Juran Trilogy, also known as Quality Trilogy was developed by Dr Joseph M. Juran, a quality management expert also known as the Architect of Quality, after he published an autobiography by the same name. He developed the framework after he had worked in Japan in the 1950s and observed how the Japanese were focusing on quality, not just productivity.

 He believed that “quality does not happen by accident

The Quality Trilogy is a project improvement cycle designed to improve the standard of goods by incorporating quality into the process.

“Quality means fitness for use” Joseph M. Juran

Dr. Joseph M, Juran

Joseph Juran created the Juran Institute in 1979, and the Juran Foundation in 1983 to offer training, certification share knowledge, and experience to help businesses deliver better, consistent quality management.

Juran edited and coauthored “A history of managing for quality”  in 1995. Juran Quality Handbook the complete guide to performance excellence is now in its seventh edition.

Joseph Juran: overcoming resistance to organisational change research paper pointed out how the human dimension is a major obstacle for quality improvement within the business.

Juran Quality Management Evolution

After WWII, Japan worked tirelessly to create better products and improve output quality. That drive led to the development of concepts like Toyota Lean ManufacturingPoke-Yoke and Hoshin Kanri.

American quality experts, such as Juran, saw that they were lagging and visited Japan to learn what they were doing right. Juran predicted that Japan would have better quality goods than the US by the mid-70s. It is then that the economist came up with the Quality Trilogy.

The methodology is based on the Pareto principle, also referred to as the 80/20 rule which states that 20% of a nation’s population accounts for 80% of the economy. Juran applied this principle to organisations. He posited that most defects are from a small fraction of the overall causes of mistakes. Using the same principle, 20% of a company’s staff can contribute to 80% of its revenue or 20% of customers generate most of the sales. 

From these examples, Juran figured that organisations could concentrate on the 20% responsible for various results, and deal with them accordingly. In the case of poor quality products, fix the mistakes, for the productive workers, reward them and focus on the profitable consumers. 

The Quality Trilogy is people-oriented and recommends engagement from the top down for better results.

Deming Cycle Vs Juran Trilogy

Another quality expert William Edwards Deming also noticed how productivity may have increased with Frederick E. Taylor and his management approach Taylorism theory but quality had drastically dropped. He came up with his solution to improve quality called The Deming Cycle (PDCA) as a way to embrace continuous improvement of quality.

Both Juran and Deming embraced the concept of business processes to improve quality management. Using documented business processes to give transparency over business operations and a way to continuously improve processes.

A Comparative Study of Deming’s and Juran’s Total Works

What is Juran’s 3 role model?

Any organisation that wants to improve quality has to factor in the three main elements of the framework.

Quality Planning

This stage involves consumer research. If you are to create products that satisfy your customers, you must first know who they are and what they need. You then have to invest in product features that respond to those specific requirements. Understanding consumer needs makes it easy to find the right employees for that particular project. During the planning period, you can also see if the company has the resources to create the necessary goods or services.

Quality Control

After establishing quality goals, you have to know if they have been achieved. Quality control covers performance evaluation. It takes place in the middle or last stages of the framework. Measuring performance means that you can identify any gaps between what you set out to do and what you managed to do. For this reason, an organisation needs metrics for tracking quality goals. Regular inspections are also necessary.

Quality Improvement

Regardless of how well a company develops its quality plan, it can always fail to meet expectations. During quality improvement, you can create processes to optimise your strategy. Before that, though, you have to identify the projects that need improvement. Then you have to provide the training, skills and resources to remedy what’s wrong. An enterprise can also set new targets at this stage.

Continuous Improvement that Reduces Errors

The Juran Trilogy is an approach that emphasises people rather than systems when looking to boost quality. Companies can apply the methodology to drive continuous improvement that reduces errors and, consequently, costs.

Checkify aims to offer businesses the same quality by reducing errors by documenting business processes in a business process management software solution. This is a software solution to guarantee everyone is keeping to the highest possible quality of service and the benefits of accountability and an audit trail and planning workflow.

Empower the team to have all the information at their fingertips to improve quality and reduce errors. Also offering you data to analyse to embrace change and manage change and continuously improve processes within the business.

Quality Trilogy / Juran Trilogy Research

Example: Strategy to improve the quality of care in England NHS. The aim of the study is a “coherent national strategy for achieving high-quality, affordable care”.  This used the Juran trilogy as one of the concepts to help improve the quality of care in the NHS.

Juran helped express the importance of the inter-relatedness of the three core processes and the importance of achieving a balance to improve health quality care within the NHS. The NHS also has a National Quality Board as they understand the importance of quality.

Example: Implementation the Trilogy Juran in SMEs Business Case Study in
Indonesia. SMEs in Indonesia have a major weakness with low product quality. The study aim was to obtain information and data regarding quality management applying the Juran Trilogy.

Other research: The Quality Trilogy – A Universal Approach to Managing for Quality 

Other Quality Standards and models

Other Quality Management systems:

Quality management system (QMS)

Enterprise Quality Management Software System EQMS:

Total Quality Management (TQM):

Capability Maturity Model (CMM)

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) :

Maturity Model

ISO: ISO 9000, 

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