The famous Quality Trilogy was first developed and written by Joseph M. Juran. As you all know, Juran is a management consultant and an Engineer, specialized in Quality management.
The Quality Trilogy explained by Juran is: Any organization taking up a journey in Quality Management will have to have three Processes in place, which are: i) Quality Planning ii) Quality Control and iii) Quality Improvement. Though the above three may sound similar, they have different objectives and serve different purposes of Quality Management.
Let us have a look at these components one by one:
- Quality Planning: As with all management activities and processes, Quality journey begins with planning the activities that needs to be done to adhere to the Vision, Mission and Goals of the organization and to comply with customer and compliance requirements.Quality Planning comprises of i) Understanding the customer, ii) Determining their needs, iii) Defining the product/service features, specifications iv)Designing the product/service v) Devising the processes that will enable to meet the customer needs.
- Quality Control: Once the processes are defined, the responsibility is now with operations, to adhere to the processes and specifications required by the product/service. For this purpose periodic checks and inspection has to be done, metrics need to be tracked, to ensure that the process is in control and meets specifications and the metrics need the set target. Wherever there is a defect a corrective and preventive action needs to be done, and root cause has to be arrived at. Also the deviation in the metrics and process audit results need to be monitored and corrected for meeting the required target as specified by the processes.
- Quality Improvement: However robust the process design and the product features are, there are chances that it may fail to meet customer requirements and design targets. It might be due to some special causes that are present in the system and might be due to change in business scenarios, customer requirements, market completion and many more forces. The role of Quality Improvement is to identify and prove the need for improvement from the exiting performance levels even though they meet the target and devise means and ways to achieve the new target and implement them successfully.
All the three processes are interlinked and will affect one another in due course of the journey. Thus the processes are corrected individually and streamlined to help each other in Quality Management journey, the end objective.