The Quality Gurus

I have chosen to write about are Dr. Joseph Juran, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Philip Crosby, Dr. Shigeo Shingo, Dr. Genichi Taguchi and Dr. Kaora Ishikawa. All of these people have made significant contributions to improving businesses, healthcare organizations, governments and countless other organizations. A guru is a good, wise person and a teacher above all else. This is coupled with these people with an approach to quality in business and life that has made a major and lasting effect on the way people of all types of businesses run their organizations.

Dr. Joseph Juran

Joseph Juran was born in Romania in 1904 but he moved to America when he was 8 years old. From the beginning of his career Juran worked in the quality profession. In 1951 he published his most recognised book “Juran’s Quality Control Handbook”. In 1952 he was invited to Japan to give some top level executive seminars which had a powerful and long lasting effect on Japanese businesses. Juran specialised in managing for quality. One of Juran’s main philosophies was his famous “Quality Trilogy”.

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This trilogy is composed of three managerial processes; planning, control and improvement. Quality planning is composed of establishing quality goals, identifying the customer, determining the customer’s needs, developing processes that are able to produce products that respond to customer’s needs, establishing process controls and transferring them to the operating forces. Quality control consists of evaluating actual quality performance, comparing this to performance goals, and trying to resolve the differences.

Quality improvement encompasses establishing the infrastructure needed quality improvement, identifying the improvement projects, establishing a project team and providing the team with the resources training and motivation needed to implement the improvements. Joseph Juran came up with the ten steps to quality improvement

1. Build awareness of the need to improve
2. Set goals for that improvement
3. Create plans to reach the goals
4. Provide training
5. Conduct projects to solve problems
6. Report on progress
7. Give recognition for success
8. Communicate results
9. Keep score
10. Maintain momentum

Juran has a practical approach to quality. His goal is to reduce the cost of quality. He identifies four costs associated with quality. These are internal costs (defects found before shipping), external costs (defects found after shipping), appraisal costs (inspection, compliance auditing and investigations) and prevention costs (stopping defects occurring in the first place).

Juran believes that management should reduce these internal and external defect costs to the point where costs incurred from extra appraisal and prevention measurses would not be covered by the savings from reduced defects. Juran believes that this will reduce the cost of quality to the minimum without imposing unrealistic goals of zero defects.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming was born in America in 1900. He is best remembered for his work in Japan where he taught statistical methods to Japanese management to help them to improve the quality of their products.

He is widely regarded as the person who played a major part in revolutionising Japanese quality systems. Deming worked closely with Ford in Japan and his systematic approach to quality brought such huge improvements in quality that soon Fords that were produced in Japan were in much higher demand than US built Fords, even though they were producing identical products. Deming later went on to be an industry consult throughout the word until his death at the age of 93. Deming believed that management were responsible for over 90% of quality problems and so he placed great importance on management.

He came up with the 7 deadly diseases which he believed significantly contributed to a lack of quality. These “diseases” were short term planning promoting fear in the workplace, overly focusing on profits and figures, and excessive costs. To counter act these 7 diseases Deming developed the 14 points for managing which has since been studied and followed the world over.

1. To create a consistency of purpose towards improvement.
2. Learn and adopt the new philosophy.
3. Design and build in quality so as to cease dependence on inspection.
4. Minimise costs through better quality.
5. Continuously improve production systems through management.
6. More on the training for employees will decrease defects.
7. Show management and supervisors to be leaders.
8. Reduce levels of fear amongst employees so that everyone can contribute effectively.
9. Encourage cooperation and communication between different ares.
10. Eliminate slogans that are based solely at the workforce and targets that ask for unrealistic levels of defects and productivity.
11. Increase supervisors focus to quality rather than quantity.
12. Foster greater employee pride in their work.
13. Get rid of barriers that don’t foster management pride in the workplace.
14. Bring in programmes for self improvement.
15. Get everybody in the organisation to work from top to bottom to accomplish the transformation.

Deming developed the Deming Cycle or the PDCA(plan, do, check, act,) cycle. This is a systematic approach to problem solving with the idea being to constantly improve. The cycle is about learning what works and what doesn’t work and then repeating the cycle all over again. This also encourages improvements in small increments which gives employees time in accept it and support it.

Demings approach to quality was very customer focused. Anything that does not add value for the customer is not a quality feature. Deming sees everyone involved in building the product as a supplier, a process and a customer. Perhaps his greatest contribution was to show the importance of culture and employee attitudes when trying to create a quality based organisation.

Dr. Shigeo Shingo

Shigeo Shingo was born in Japan in 1909. He qualified as an industrial engineer and went on to become one the leading experts on improving manufacturing processes.

He is best known for his work with Toyota where he developed his just- in- time (JIT) manufacturing methods. He was the inventor of the single minute exchange of die (SMED) system which drastically reduced set up times. He is perhaps best known for inventing the Poka-Yoke system (Mistake proofing system). In poka-yoke Shingo makes the distinction between errors and defects. Poka-yoke tries to stop errors becoming defects. In poka-yoke process are stopped as soon as errors occur. The source of the error is then identified and steps are put in place so that the error does not happen again.

With this mistake proofing system Shingo strives to reach zero quality control where mistakes are eliminated completely. Poka-yoke also introduces check lists as Shingo believes that it is inevitable that humans will forget things and make mistakes. Shingo’s single minute exchange of die is a process that allows quick changeover between products. This allows a huge reduction in set up times which allows for production of small batches of products with very little disruption. Shingo’s JIT production keeps companies inventory levels low by only producing what the customer wants when they want it.

This greatly helped companies to reduce costs associated with inventories. In my workplace in a medical device company there are signs of Shigeo Shingo’s influence everywhere. Shingo’s poka-yoke system is used on the manufacturing line to prevent errors from reoccurring. Defects are examined at the point of the defect and the source of the defect is determined. Preventative action is then put in place if possible to prevent this same defect occurring again. Check lists are put in place at every point of work to prevent mistakes from occurring.

SMED systems are also used widely in my work. Materials, machines and process are kept as similar as possible so as to reduce set up times so that we can produce big or small batches with minimal disruption. Philip Crosby Philip Crosby was born in Florida in 1926. He was the quality control manager at the Martin Company, Florida which is where he initiated his zero defects program. Crosby had an aim to change the attitude of top level management about quality. He made quality more measurable as a cost and in doing so he could show the true expense of doing things wrong.

Crosby’s most famous concepts were his “zero defects” and “quality is free” concepts. These theories were backed up by Crosby’s Four Absolutes of Quality Management.

1. Quality means conformance to requirements
2. Prevention, rather than appraisal should be the system for achieving quality
3. Zero defects should be the standard of conformance
4. Quality should be measured by the cost of non-conformance.

These Four Absolutes of Quality Management are supported by Crosby’s 14 steps of quality improvement. These steps are there to show that management is committed to quality.

There should be quality improvement teams put in place to determine where problems lie. The cost of quality should be evaluated and awareness of quality should be heightened. Corrective action should be put in place and the situation should be monitored. Encourage individual improvement and get employees more involved in quality feedback. People who actively participate in quality improvement should be recognised. These steps should be continuously enforced to show that quality is never ending. Crosby introduced the “Crosby Vaccine ” as a preventative measure for poor quality for management.

It is split into 5 sections which covers TQM. These sections are Integrity, Systems, Communication, Operations and Pride. In my work in the medical device industry I can see the influence of Philip Crosby. The four absolutes of quality management are enforced every day. Conformance to requirements is of the foremost importance on the production line. Steps are enforced to prevent mistakes from happening reather than dealing with them when they happen. There is a policy of zero defects which the company tries to communicate to the employees.

As we as all this I can see that the company makes huge efforts to get all employees involved in making suggestions to improve quality throughout the company by introducing schemes such as the “My Ideas” scheme. Here, employees can submit ideas on how to improve quality and they can be rewarded and acknowledged for their efforts.

Dr. Genichi Taguchi

Genichi Taguchi was born in Japan in 1924. Taguchi used statistics to improve the quality of manufactured goods. Taguchi emphasises putting the quality back into the design of products before they are manufactured. He believes that products should be robust.

Taguchi breaks down design into three phases, system design, parameter design and tolerance design. This allows designers to find the optimum settings to produce a product that can survive manufacturing every time and produce products that always conform to specification. The system design is basically the idea of the design, deciding what you want it to be able to do. The parameter design is where nominal values are defined for parameters so as to minimise variation in manufacturing. The tolerance design shows the effect that the parameters have on the products performance.

Taguchi also introduced many different methods for analysing results of experiments such as “analyses of variance” and “minute analyses”. Although some of Taguchi’s statistical methods are disputed, he has been very influential in improving manufacturing quality worldwide. Dr. Kaora Ishikawa Kaoru Ishikawa was born in Japan in 1915. He is best known for the cause and effect diagram that is used in the analyses of industrial processes. Ishikawa believes that all employees have a greater role to play and without this we are limiting the potential for improvement. Ishikawa introduced “quality circles” and had a big emphasis on the ”internal customer. ”

References

1. http://0-web. ebscohost. com. library. itsligo.ie
2. A Framework for Comparison, Ghobadian, Abby, Speller, Simon
3. http://www. businessballs. com/dtiresources/quality_management_gurus_theories. pdf
4. The Original Quality Gurus, DTI.
5. http://www. enotes. com/management-encyclopedia/quality-gurus -Encyclopedia of Management, Mildred Golden Pryor
6. http://www. qualitygurus. com
7. http://www. skymark. com
8. W. Edwards Deming – The Father of Quality Evolution

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