8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
Management through fear impedes productivity and quality. Workers must feel unafraid to express ideas and ask questions otherwise they will simply do enough to meet minimal standards and not pursue quality. Workers questions arise from their desire to improve the process, which in turn improves the business. This culture should be nurtured.
9. Break down barriers between departments.
Processes and departments must recognize themselves as only a part of the organization. Lack of communication between departments can cause loss of time and sales. They must communicate to ensure overall quality of the organization. Deming proposed the existence of quality teams within each department to combine relevant skills and resources to develop designs with improved quality. Businesses can name and chart processes and management can ensure communication.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortation, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity.
People don’t make the most mistakes, the processes they are working in do. Therefore the power to effect improvement lies not with the workforce but the management. With this in mind, slogans and targets are deemed by Deming to be targeting the wrong people and businesses should discourage the use of them.
11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor;
Quotas and management by objective (MBO) interfere with quality, perhaps more than any working condition. They focus on the end goal rather than the processes involved. This offers little opportunity to improve, as the process remains the same as long as the quotas are met. Businesses should realize that reliance on production targets results in poor quality.
12. Remove barriers that rob hourly employees, management, and engineering of their right to pride of workmanship.
Employees are denied their pride of workmanship through various management shortcomings and lack of focus on the human processes. He suggests abolishing merit and rating systems as they promote competitiveness between individuals or departments and detract from company strategy. Businesses should develop predictable processes where over time most employees will perform at about the same level.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
Point 6 demands that businesses train staff to achieve a foundation of common knowledge. Point 13 encourages individual training and education, often in new subjects, to ultimately improve processes. Businesses should meet this obligation to make sure the individual is given meaningful work and training which promotes pride in their work, often linked to self-improvement.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.
The first milestone towards achieving a quality culture is that the employees understand the 14 points and become active in the transformation. Businesses are built of processes. Only by analyzing and understanding each process can it, and ultimately the business, be improved.
(approximately 998 words)
Assignment 3
Describe why Juran is an important quality guru. Refer to Juran’s trilogy in your answer and explain why each one of quality planning, quality costing and quality inspection is important, when managing in a quality way.
Although the name Joseph Juran may have received less exposure than other quality gurus, his impact on managers, businesses, nations and the products and services we buy and use each day has been profound. Juran has been called the "father" of quality, a quality "guru" and the man who "taught quality to the Japanese.” He has been instrumental in shaping management ideas about quality as well as altering the approach to manufacturing. Executive Director of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers, states categorically that, "Dr. Juran is the greatest authority on quality control in the entire world." His literary contribution to the subject of quality management is great, hundreds of published papers and over 20 published books, with many titles considered now as reference works. His reference work on quality management, the Quality Control Handbook, first published in 1951 is now in its fourth edition.
Unlike Deming, Juran focused on the role of the senior staff in quality management, insisting that quality control must be an integral part of the management system. Again unlike Deming, Juran proposed that companies should reduce the cost of quality. Quality costs are the costs associated with preventing, finding, and correcting defective work. These costs are huge, sometimes running at 20% - 40% of sales. Many of these costs can be significantly reduced or completely avoided using Juran’s methods and tools.
Juran defines quality itself as ‘fitness for use’, which he divides into quality of design, quality of conformance, availability and service. Juran’s concepts endeavor to increase quality, necessitate increased conformance and decreased quality costs. But more than anything Juran has taken the philosophies of quality from its statistical beginnings to what is now known as total quality control (TQM).
In Juran’s view these goals in quality can only be achieved through managerial processes. Juran defined three managerial processes that are necessary to achieve quality. The three processes combined are called the Juran Trilogy and include quality planning, quality control and quality improvement.
Quality Planning
‘Create a process that will be able to meet established goals and do so under operating conditions’ –Juran
This is the activity of developing the products and processes required to meet customer's needs. Juran developed a series of principles as follows;
- Meet customers' needs
- Minimize product dissatisfaction
- Avoid rework
- Optimize company performance
- Allow participation by everyone in the company.
Never afraid to provide managerial tools as well as principles, Juran also provided a 10-step roadmap for quality planning in his book, Quality Control Handbook, 4th edition. The steps shown below require measurements at every stage to be effective.
- Identify Customers
- Discover Customers' Needs
- Translate the Customers' Needs into our Language
- Establish Units of Measure
- Establish Measurement
- Develop Product
- Optimize Product Design
- Develop the Process
- Optimize: Prove the Process Capability
- Transfer to Operations
When applied to quality management within a company these steps can implement a robust quality costing system.
Quality Control
‘Keep the waste from getting worse; meet quality goals during operations’-Juran
Juran insists that processes, even ones known to work well, must be constantly monitored. Such monitoring will produce an information loop providing feedback on the process enabling continual control. The monitoring process consists of;
- Evaluating the performance of the system and reporting that performance.
- Understanding the specification, goal or standard and comparing the actual performance to the spec, goal or standard. If there are significant discrepancies, this is reported
- Make changes to the system to assure agreement with the spec, goal or standard.
Quality Improvement
‘Breaking through to unprecedented levels of performance’ –Juran
Juran maintains that upper management is solely responsible for improving quality and deploying what the Japanese call Company-Wide Quality Management (CWQM). This entails:
- Creating an awareness of the need for quality improvement,
- Mandating quality improvement,
- Creating the infrastructure,
- Training everyone,
- Reviewing progress,
- Recognizing successes,
- Expounding the results
This can all be shown in the following control chart (Diagram 1.0):
(diagram 1.0): Quality trilogy control chart
Source: http://www.simplesystemsintl.com/quality_gurus/juran.gif
Juran’s importance in the field of quality management is without question. He developed specific concepts, principles, methods and tools – beginning even before the Second World War, largely known and applied by many organizations worldwide. For example Juran introduced the concept of the Pareto principle, which millions of managers rely on to help separate the "vital few" from the "useful many" in their activities. In the student’s opinion Juran’s willingness to supply managerial tools as well as principles is a strong point.
His quality trilogy is intended to be an endless feedback loop (Diagram 1.1) employing company strategy rather than company tactics: company strategy being the overall management and company mission, company tactics being the day-to-day operations of the production line concentrating on individual tasks.
(Diagram 1.1): Quality improvement process
Source: (2003)
(approximately 812 words)
Assignment 5
‘The Ishakawa diagram is a tool that can demonstrate cause and effects in quality issues. Draw out and example of an Ishakawa diagram and demonstrate the importance for managing in a quality way. Select two more tools or techniques that can help quality management. Describe and explain the importance of each tool that you select.’
Ishikawa Diagrams
An Ishikawa diagram, also known as a cause and effect diagram or fishbone diagram due to its appearance, is used where there is a list of possible causes to one problem. As a graphical tool they are used to explore and display opinion about sources of variation in a process. The problem or effect is placed at the head of the diagram and the potential causes are placed on bones coming off the main backbone of the structure (see diagram below).
These causes can be placed into the usual four categories if desired: materials, machines, manpower and methods. These categories can be revised if required but in general between three and six categories are chosen. Brainstorming sessions can then take place to expand on these categories to find more specific causes adding more bones to the main bones. These causes are subdivided to about 5 levels at maximum systematically listing all the different causes that could be attributed to a specific problem (or effect).
Diagram 1.2 shows a fishbone diagram from a company producing PVC sealer called Cemedine, trying to improve their sealant application process for customers. It is used as an overall guide to their employees worldwide. It is reported in the guide that the use of the diagram would give a complete understanding of the causes of problems and could, “ actually help keep them from developing”. The company also notes, “the early detection, root cause analysis and quick countermeasure of these problems is essential to help our customers maintain their quality goals as well as reducing costs associated with downtime and repairs.” - Source: (2003)
The Ishikawa diagram is probably best used with a group of people rather than individually. In quality management, quality improvement teams or Kaizen teams, can draw out the diagram and brainstorm to include the main causes on the diagram. The team leader could then collect more suggestions from the team until the diagram is completed. In the student’s opinion this works well as a quality tool. The teasing of opinions from the team, often including, production line workers, encourages a culture of quality improvement while reducing the fear for workers to express their opinion. As well as this processes can be dissected to their smallest components and subsequently be fine-tuned with ideas often triggered by seeing the entire on paper.
(Diagram 1.2) Ishikawa diagram from Cemedine Sealant quality manual.
Source: (2003)
Pareto Analysis
Named after the nineteenth-century Italian economist, Wilfred Pareto, the Pareto analysis tool was popularized by Joseph Juran in his Quality Control Handbook (1988). It prioritizes which problems to solve first within an organization, highlighting the fact that most problems are derived from only a few of the causes. Juran phrased this as the, “vital few and trivial many”. More commonly known as the 80/20 rule, it assumes 80% of all problems are derived from 20% of all the types. By interpreting the results with this assumption, the highest priority (the vital few) can be addressed.
Data about the problems is collected, with the problem occurring most placed first on a bar chart and the least placed last. The Frequency of each problem is expressed as a percentage and is displayed on the bar graph. As well as this a line graph is placed above the bar graph to express the cumulative percentage of the problems (Diagram 1.3).
(Diagram 1.3): Pareto analysis diagram
Source: (2003)
Drawing a line from the y-axis at the 80% mark can isolate the important causes from the trivial ones. If action is then taken to correct the important causes the correction should affect the trivial ones.
Obviously depending on the type of improvement in quality the company is trying to implement the frequency will be based on different measurements. For example if the improvement goal is a reduction in costs then the bar-chart percentages would be measured in cost and the most expensive cause would be tackled first.
In quality management Pareto analysis is a powerful tool for highlighting attention to the main factors contributing towards a quality problem. Often used after a dissection of the quality problem into possible causes, through an Ishikawa diagram, it can generate ideas and suggestions to gain control over these causes. Its use should be continual though, to maintain effectiveness and over a period of time will show pictorial evidence of an improvement in quality.
Scatter Diagrams
Scatter diagrams are used to examine the possible relationship between two variables, cause and effect. Although these diagrams cannot prove that one variable causes the other, they do indicate the existence of a relationship, as well as the strength of that relationship.
The diagram has one variable plotted on the y-axis, usually the cause, and the other variable on the x-axis, usually the effect (See diagram right). The overall shape of the scattered points plotted presents valuable information about the graph. The slope of the diagram indicates the type of relationship that exits. Simply put, variables that follow a linear pattern are related while variables that do not aren’t.
Linearity has four main parameters that must be taken into consideration to draw more information from the diagram:
- Correlation – If the plotted points are close to being a straight line there is a strong correlation.
- Slope – The steeper the correlated points are the greater the relationship is. An increase in the cause (x-axis) has a larger impact on the effect(y-axis).
- Direction - The cause variable can affect the effect variable either positively or negatively.
- Y-axis intercept – Drawing a line through the plotted point, following the slope, results in the line crossing the y-axis. This is the maximum Y value for a negative slope and the minimum Y value for a positive slope.
Using these parameters enables the interpretation of the scatter diagrams and is a valuable tool for problem solving in quality management. Ishikawa offered useful information on how to interpret a scatter diagram in his books, The Guide to Quality Control and The Statistical Quality Control Handbook.
(approximately 1000 words)
Bibliography
Books:
Dale, 1999,Managing Quality, Blackwell publishing
J.Duran, 1979, Quality control handbook, New York: McGraw Hill
J.Storey, 1995, Human Resource Mangement: A critical text, Routledge, London.
Websites:
http://www.helsetilsynet.com (2003)
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Images:
http://www.jpa.ac.jp/gakkou/img/pdca.gif (PDCA diagram)
mielsvr2.ecs.umass.edu/virtual_econ/ module2/Cause_effect.ht (Ishakawa diagram)
All other unoriginal images referenced.
