What is Juran Trilogy? Components

What is Juran Trilogy?

The Juran Trilogy refers to a management framework developed by Joseph M. Juran, a renowned quality management expert. It consists of three interrelated and sequential processes aimed at improving the quality of products and services within an organization.

Quality of Design

Quality of design refers to the quality that a service provider intends to offer to customers. The concept of Quality of Design or Quality by Design (QbD) was first introduced by Joseph M. Juran who was a quality expert. He described a concept called Juran trilogy, which is an improvement cycle used to reduce the instances of poor quality by incorporating quality into a process/product. In case of services, quality needs to be planned into the service design process.

Let us discuss basic quality processes in these three components of Juran trilogy:

Quality Planning

• identifying external and internal customers and determining their needs.
  
  
• developing service features that are responsive to customer needs.
  
  
• constructing a set of quality goals that are able to meet the needs of customers and suppliers at the minimum possible cost.
  
  
• establishing the required service process.
  
  
• establishing the process capability and proving that the service process can meet the quality goals

Quality Control

• selecting what is to be controlled (i.e. control subjects) along with units of measurement.
  
  
• establishing the standards ofperformance
  
  
• measuring the actual performance
  
  
• calculating the difference between actual and standard performance
  
  
• addressing issues due to which differences crop up.

Quality Improvement

• establishing the ground forimprovement by clearly defining why improvement is required.
  
  
• identifying the areas ofimprovement.
  
  
• identifying all the causes that lead to quality issues
  
  
• establishing various remedies that can be provided
  
  
• verifying whether the remedies are effective under operating conditions.

According to Juran, quality can be planned and most of the quality issues arise as a result of poor quality planning. While developing quality standards for a service, a service provider must take into consideration customers’ requirements. Analysing customers’ requirements helps in testing the ‘fitness of the service’ for use as described by Juran.

It is important that the final design translates into a service (and service quality) that reflects customers’ requirements. Quality of design can be evaluated by the completeness and correctness of specifications, drawings, catalogues, etc.

The end product of service design is a concept, idea or description of a process for the performance of the concept. It must be noted that the outcome of each service design trials may not be uniform as each service trial may result in different experiences. Scrutinising a product after it has been produced or examining a service after it has been delivered does not help in improving product/service quality. For this reason, quality improvement needs to be implemented at the service design stage itself.

A few techniques that are used by service designers in order to incorporate quality into the service design are as follows:

• Creating a simple design with few components
  
  
• Implementing customer requirements, needs and expectations into the service design
  
  
• Reducing the cost of customer losses

Service designers frequently use various tools for designing quality into services. These include quality function deployment, Poka-Yoke and Taguchi methods. These methods have been explained in detail in a previous chapter of this book.