2.2 Quality Pioneers: Deming, Juran & Crosby

2.2 Quality Pioneers: Deming, Juran & Crosby

The modern quality movement was shaped by three American thinkers whose teachings revolutionized post-World War II industrial manufacturing in Japan and later transformed Western industry: Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Joseph M. Juran, and Philip B. Crosby. Mastery of their respective models, experiments, and management philosophies is essential for the ASQ CQIA examination.

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1. W. Edwards Deming: Systems Thinking & Profound Knowledge

Dr. W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993), a statistician and management consultant, was invited by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) in 1950 to lecture top Japanese industrial executives. Deming asserted that management is responsible for 85% to 94% of all quality problems, because management designs, funds, and maintains the operational system within which employees work.

                    THE DEMING CHAIN REACTION
┌─────────────────┐     ┌─────────────────┐     ┌─────────────────┐
│ Improve Quality │ ──> │ Costs Decrease  │ ──> │  Productivity   │
│ (fewer errors,  │     │ (less rework,   │     │    Improves     │
│  less scrap)    │     │  fewer delays)  │     │                 │
└─────────────────┘     └─────────────────┘     └─────────────────┘
                                                         │
                                                         ▼
┌─────────────────┐     ┌─────────────────┐     ┌─────────────────┐
│  Provide More   │ <── │ Stay in Business│ <── │ Capture Market  │
│      Jobs       │     │ (sustain the    │     │ (superior value │
│                 │     │  enterprise)    │     │  & lower price) │
└─────────────────┘     └─────────────────┘     └─────────────────┘

Deming's 14 Points for Management

Deming synthesized his holistic management philosophy into 14 essential obligations for executive leadership:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, allocating resources for long-term survival rather than short-term quarterly gains.
2. Adopt the new philosophy. Western management must awaken to the challenge, learn responsibilities, and lead the transformation.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate mass inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on price tag alone. Move toward single-supplier relationships based on long-term loyalty, trust, and minimum total cost.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
6. Institute training on the job for workers and management to ensure deep process comprehension.
7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines do a better job, not merely punish failures.
8. Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively, speak up, and report problems without fear of reprisal.
9. Break down barriers between departments. Research, design, sales, and production must work as an integrated team to anticipate process challenges.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce asking for zero defects and new productivity levels without providing the operational methods.
11. Eliminate numerical quotas (work standards) on the factory floor and management by numerical goals/MBO; substitute capable leadership.
12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, including merit ratings and annual performance appraisals that create destructive internal competition.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone in the organization.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.

Deming's System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK)

In The New Economics, Deming integrated his management philosophy into four interconnected theoretical pillars:

1. Appreciation for a System: An organization is an interdependent network of processes and human stakeholders working toward a common aim. Optimizing individual departments in isolation sub-optimizes the entire enterprise.
2. Knowledge about Variation: Variation exists in every process. Management must distinguish between common cause variation (inherent random background noise, addressable only by changing the system) and special cause variation (assignable, intermittent spikes requiring local containment). Confusing common causes with special causes leads to tampering, which mathematically increases process variability.
3. Theory of Knowledge: Knowledge is founded on theory, hypotheses, and prediction. Experience alone teaches nothing without an underlying theoretical framework. This forms the foundation of the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle.
4. Knowledge of Psychology: Humans are driven by intrinsic motivators (curiosity, pride of workmanship, joy in learning). Extrinsic reward systems (ranking, grading, incentive pay) crush intrinsic motivation and foster fear.

Landmark Experiments by Deming

• The Red Bead Experiment: Using a paddle to draw beads from a bowl containing 20% red (defective) beads, Deming demonstrated that willing workers cannot produce white beads when the process system contains red beads. Defect rates are dictated by process design, not worker diligence.
• The Funnel Experiment: Deming showed that adjusting the position of a funnel after every marble drop to compensate for the previous error (Rules 2, 3, and 4) significantly increases dispersion compared to leaving the funnel fixed over the target (Rule 1). This proved mathematically that tampering with a stable process amplifies variation.

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2. Joseph M. Juran: Fitness for Use & The Juran Trilogy

Dr. Joseph M. Juran (1904–2008) approached quality from a structured executive and managerial standpoint. He defined quality fundamentally as "fitness for use" and emphasized that quality does not happen by accident; it must be systematically planned, controlled, and improved.

The Juran Trilogy

Juran established that managing for quality consists of three universal managerial processes:

                  THE JURAN TRILOGY GRAPH
Defect Rate
     ▲
     │  Quality Planning
     │  ┌──────────────┐       Sporadic Spike (handled by Quality Control)
     │  │ Initial Zone │          /\
     │  │  of Chronic  │─────────/  \──────┐
     │  │    Waste     │                   │  BREAKTHROUGH IMPROVEMENT
     │  └──────────────┘                   └───\ (Quality Improvement)
     │                                          \─────────┐ New Zone of
     │                                                    │ Chronic Waste
     │                                                    └───────────────
     └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────► Time

1. Quality Planning: Identifying internal and external customers, determining their explicit and implicit needs, developing product features to fulfill those needs, and designing capable processes to deliver those features.
2. Quality Control: Measuring actual performance during operations, comparing performance against quality goals, and acting on differences to suppress sporadic spikes back to the historical baseline.
3. Quality Improvement: Diagnosing the root causes of chronic waste, establishing project infrastructure, proving the need for investment, implementing cures, and achieving a breakthrough to a superior performance baseline.

Application of the Pareto Principle to Quality

Juran was the first to apply Vilfredo Pareto's 80/20 economic principle to quality management. He coined the famous phrase "the vital few and the useful many" (originally "vital few and trivial many"). In quality terms: approximately 80% of defects, failure costs, and customer complaints stem from roughly 20% of root causes. Juran showed that improvement teams must isolate the vital few issues rather than dissipating resources across every minor symptom.

Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ)

Juran championed expressing quality failures in the universal language of money (dollars). By quantifying scrap, rework, warranty payouts, and lost customer retention in financial terms, quality professionals could successfully capture executive leadership attention and investment.

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3. Philip B. Crosby: Zero Defects & "Quality is Free"

Philip B. Crosby (1926–2001) served as Corporate Vice President of Quality at ITT and authored the landmark 1979 best-seller Quality is Free. Crosby focused on organizational culture, management commitment, and executive communication, rejecting the traditional notion that a certain level of defects is an acceptable cost of doing business.

"Quality is Free"

Crosby argued that quality is not an expensive luxury; what costs money are the unquality actions—the rework, scrap, warranty repairs, inspections, and customer service rectifications that occur because tasks were not performed right the first time. When an organization builds quality into its processes upfront, the financial savings gained from defect reduction far exceed the cost of prevention. Hence, quality is free.

Crosby's Four Absolutes of Quality Management

Crosby established four non-negotiable principles for quality excellence:

Price of Nonconformance (PONC) vs. Price of Conformance (POC)

• Price of Nonconformance (PONC): The total financial expense incurred by failing to do things right the first time (e.g., scrap, rework, expediting fees, warranty claims, billing corrections).
• Price of Conformance (POC): The planned expenditure invested to do things right the first time (e.g., operator training, process capability verification, mistake-proofing, preventive maintenance).

Crosby's 14 Steps to Quality Improvement

Crosby prescribed a sequential 14-step implementation roadmap emphasizing management commitment, quality improvement teams, quality awareness, supervisor training, "Zero Defects Day," goal setting, error-cause removal, and quality councils.

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4. Master Comparison: Deming vs. Juran vs. Crosby