Although aspects of quality in the manufacturing environment have been around from the early 1900s, what one has come to know about quality today is that it was achieved through a process of evolution or continual improvement. Quality has always been driven by what the consumer wants or needs, but that provides a wide berth of true meanings. This paper will review some of the meanings, elements of quality and one of the pioneers in this area. As mentioned quality is based on one’s demands on the manufacturer or service provider that then takes into account the quality of the manufacturer’s employees, the processes to manufacture, and the environment in which products are produced. The goal of quality is to ensure that the manufacturer is producing a product that meets or exceeds its customer expectations and the ability to keep the customer for the long term. At the same time quality-driven practices help the company reduce productivity errors by empowering the employees, reduce their costs by requiring suppliers to do the same, and deliver the product on time based on a strategic plan. Of course, quality standards in the United States may and are different from other parts of the world. The origins of quality in the United States took much of its shape from Japan in the mid-1900s when it was realized that most consumers referred to Japanese made products as poor quality; by taking charge of their manufacturing destiny quality in Japan turned a 180 degrees. It was during this same period that some of the quality pioneers we are familiar with took their shape on the world. One such pioneer of quality was Joseph M. Juran, who was also one of the oldest in this profession just passing away in 2008, referred to as the “father of quality” (The Juran Institute, 2010), and considered to be a true theorist on the subject. Dr. Juran began his quality span measuring quality in a statistical format to manufacturing problems. What Dr. Juran discovered is that there is more to quality than numbers; the human element of managerial perspective was needed to add a new dimension in the process unlike Deming, who focused on “criteria and that these criteria change continually” (Goetsch & Davis, 2010, p. 4). Juran’s Three Basic Steps to Progress, Ten Steps to Quality, The Pareto Principle, and the Juran Trilogy were the highlights of Dr. Juran’s quality involvement to the field. Even in Dr. Juran’s opinion the three basic steps were “broad steps” (Goetsch & Davis, 2010, p. 17) and his Ten Steps overlapped “Deming’s Fourteen Points” (Goetsch & Davis, 2010, p. 17). Even the Pareto Principle goes by other names by other quality experts, but the Juran Trilogy explained the managerial functions in a specified method unlike others at that time. The Juran Trilogy has three steps: quality planning, quality improvement, and quality control. The impact of this looks at the management ideas that planning involves identifying who the customers are as well as their needs so a product will be developed accordingly, improvement optimizes the process to produce the product, and control over the operating conditions translates to reduced inspections. In 1979, the Juran Institute was established and is still in existence today. Based upon the works and principles of Dr. Juran the emphasis on quality continues today in businesses and in universities where the emphasis on learning about quality is a degree-granting field of study. This is important more today than even a few decades ago as technology and the global business environment is in constant change at the speed of light per say. Organizations realize the importance of quality from the consumer’s standpoint, the different levels of consumer buying power, and demands for always seeking a better product to make the consumers lives easier as time is a factor in the consumer’s daily life. The scope of quality is broad and this paper just nicked the tipped of the iceberg on the topic. Quality has different meaning to different people and the focus has to be on organizations to figure that out to produce a product or service the consumer will want and want to obtain again. The principles of the quality pioneers established the starting point of quality but today’s business environment requires the continuous improvement in this field of study.
References
Goetsch, D. L., & Davis, S. B. (2010). Quality management for organizational excellence (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
The Juran Institute. (2010). Our founder. Retrieved from http://www.juran.com/about_juran_institute_our_founder.html