Quality Trilogy

Fundamentals

Competition is the order of the day in the corporate world today. Although businesses compete on several fronts, the essential features of management have always centered on customer needs and requirements. In a knowledge-based economy, customers expect firms to introduce better and cheaper products, offer higher service levels, reduce wastes, and provide job opportunities. The mission statements of business enterprises today often emphasize the need to create quality and value for the customer. In practice, a three-step quality management process that represents the quality trilogy is normally adopted in realizing such a goal:

• Planning for quality
• Identifying control activities and taking corrective actions in ensuring the performance of the system in question
• Introducing continuous improvement initiatives to create and maintain a more capable system.

The objective of planning for quality is to outline ways to “do the right things correctly” so that the cost of poor quality can be minimized. To ensure a stable system performance, executable control actions need to be taken based on the principles of quality assurance. The main function of continuous improvement is to find opportunities for enhancing system capabilities and subsequently achieving a better system performance. This practical engagement, known as quality trilogy, is one of Juran’s methods to tackle quality problems. The ultimate aim of this process is to achieve quality.

To many organizations, quality is conformance to specifications. To others, quality is in the eyes of the beholders. Quality means different things to different people. The most commonly stated quality definitions for tangible products are presented by James Robert Evans and W. M. Lindsay. They define product quality as a function of a specific, measurable variable that reflects differences in quantity of some product attributes such as the life span of a laptop battery. A somewhat different view of quality is process centric. A typical operations system today, as stated by Christian Madu and Chuhua Kuei, involves a variety of processes: customer engagement, manufacturing, and sourcing. With respect to each process, a unique set of attributes can contribute to what a customer perceives as quality. For example, as per Leonard Berry and A. Parasuraman, customer engagement quality consists of five dimensions: reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangibles. Gravin’s model can be adopted to represent dimensions of manufacturing quality. We can also use the 2009 model presented by Lars-Eric Gadde and Kajsa Hulthén to evaluate sourcing quality.

With this goal (product and/or process quality) in mind, businesses need to find proven paths to help find ways to structure, bundle, and leverage their resources and produce high-quality outputs and outcomes. It is apparent from Juran’s teachings that quality trilogy can maximize the likelihood of business success since it is a learning framework based on three critical steps: planning, controlling, and improving. Thus, the call for quality trilogy is not only good for maintaining a stable operation but is also good in finding new opportunities and improving the long-term capabilities of the operational system.

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