Joseph Moses Juran was born in Romania. At the beginning of the 20th century, he moved with the family to Minnesota, USA. He was an outstanding student, especially in mathematics. In 1924 Juran graduated with a Bachelor in electrical engineering and started to work at Western Electric in the Inspection Department of the Hawthorne Works in Chicago. The next year, as a part of Hawthorne Works personnel, he was trained with newly developed innovative statistical quality control methods. This experience gave Juran a foundation of his later career when he passed on the knowledge and held courses and training on statistical methods to companies‟ managers.
He also became a professor of Industrial Engineering and Chairman
of the department in New York University‟s College of Engineering.
That position gave him enough time to create a consulting practice and develop his management philosophies. One of his outstanding works is the book Quality Control Handbook, released in 1951, which represent the standard reference work for quality managers. Consequently, Juran got in 1952 an invitation from the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers to teach Japanese leaders the principles of quality management in order to rebuild their economy (Godfrey & Kenett, 2007).
While Deming in his approach was more concerned with developing a systematic concept of quality improvement, Juran‟s approach of managing the quality was more practical.
Like Deming‟s, around 1950, Juran‟s work was also affected by World War II. Juran went to Japan and hold lectures about managing the quality. He paid special attention focusing on human resources in managing the quality, especially on the role of top-down management (Ross, 2009). He believed that top management is mostly responsible for quality problems and providing the training for them would improve quality and reduce expenses, while increasing productivity (Landesberg, 1999). Whereas workers are encouraged to solve their problems with innovative solutions.
Furthermore, he was best known for using the Pareto Principle in quality management and introducing the trilogy approach: quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement.
Namely, the universal Pareto Principle stands that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes or an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. This principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. The Pareto Principle is also known as the Pareto Rule or the 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle, 2019).
Juran was the first to use the universal Pareto Principle in solving the quality problems in his work. He used terms vital few and useful many to refer to those few causes that account for most of the effects and to those many others which account for a smaller proportion of the effect (Juran, 2019). Juran believed that it is very important for the organizations to apply the Pareto Principle and with this knowledge to identify that 20%, which means eliminating the 20% of mistakes causing the majority of defects, rewarding the 20% of employees causing 80% of the success and serving the 20% of loyal customers that drive sales (Lopresti, 2018).
Like Pareto, Juran introduced the universal thought process of managing the quality, which fits all functions, all levels and products lines, known as a quality trilogy, or also known as Juran trilogy. This concept also includes three basic quality-oriented processes: quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement.
Quality planning represents the first step in quality management within organization. The quality planning process includes the identification of the customers and their needs, developing the features of the product that respond to their needs, establishing quality goals that meet needs of customers and suppliers and do so at a minimum combined cost and the proof of process capability. Then, quality control process includes the choice of control of subjects and units of measurement, establishing the measurements and standards of performance, measuring of actual performance, interpretation of the difference and take actions on the difference.
Finally, the quality improvement process includes the prove of the need of improvement, the identification of specific project for improvement, organization to guide the project and diagnosing for discovery of causes, provision of remedies, the prove that remedies are effective under operating conditions and the proof for control to hold the gains (Juran, 1986). The quality trilogy is an example of cause and effect relationships. Quality improvement is focused on reducing chronic problems by inducing structural changes and process improvements.
The purpose of quality trilogy is to avoid the cost of poor quality. It is stated that without the change, there will be a constant waste; during change, there will be increased costs, but after the improvement, margins will be higher and the increased costs are recouped (Vijayan &
Ramakrishnan, 2014). Similar are Deming´s findings that cost reductions are based on saving with reworks and less material, labour and energy wasted in inferior products or services (Deming, 1995)
In addition, the authors Godfrey and Kenett (2007), claim that the philosophy of Six Sigma Quality of the 1980s directly builds on methodologies developed by Juran in the 1960s. The concept of Six Sigma has been adopted by many of the world‟s leading companies. It was developed in the Motorola factory in America. The goal of the process is to improve the quality of finished products by identifying and removing the cause of the defects, minimizing variability in production and business processes.
The Six Sigma name comes from statistical methods, where the
developed business process can be described as sigma or standard deviation that indicates the size of the deviation in the data group.
Motorola calculated that processes centred on target with six standard deviations from the upper and lower specifications would produce essentially perfect products. But since most processes have some shift around the mean, Motorola allowed for a 1.5 standard deviation shift of the mean, meaning, in their terms, a Six Sigma process creates no more than 3.4 parts per million falling outside of the specification limits. The higher the sigma number is, the better.
The Six Sigma process drives out waste and improves the quality, cost and time performance. Six Sigma levels are achieved using the Define–Measure–Analyze–Improve–Control (DMAIC) problem-solving and improvement methodology. DMAIC is, in fact, the Juran's‟ quality improvement steps, later codified in the DMAIC, designed to impact causes so that the effect is an improvement in efficiencies and quality.
Juran is a founder of Juran Institute in Wilton, Connecticut. The Institute provides international training, certification, and consulting services in quality management, Lean manufacturing management, and business process management, as well as Six Sigma certification (Juran, 2019). Doing more with less by employing „lean thinking‟. Lean manufacturing involves never ending efforts to eliminate or reduce 'muda' (Japanese for waste or any activity that consumes resources without adding value) in design, manufacturing, distribution, and customer service processes (Business dictionary, 2019).