Quality Management Fundamentals: Juran’s Spheres and Deming’s 14 Points

Posted on Nov 8, 2025 in Design

Foundational Concepts in Quality Management

Defining Quality

Quality is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bears on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.

Approaches to Quality Definition

  • User-Based Approach: Related to users defining the features and attributes they consider important.
  • Manufacturing-Based Approach: Relates to meeting engineering specifications in order to meet quality standards. This is generally the most comfortable definition for engineers in defining quality in that it is specific, measurable, and objective.

Dimensions of Product Quality

  1. Performance: Primary product characteristics.
  2. Features: Secondary characteristics.
  3. Conformance: Meeting specifications or industry standards.
  4. Reliability: Consistency of performance over time.
  5. Durability: Useful life.
  6. Serviceability: Resolution of problems and complaints.
  7. Response: Human-to-human interface.
  8. Aesthetics: Sensory characteristics.
  9. Reputation: Past performance and other intangibles.

Dimensions of Service Quality

  1. Tangibles: Physical appearance of facility, equipment, personnel, communication materials, and exteriors.
  2. Reliability: Performing the service dependably, on time, in the same manner, and without errors.
  3. Responsiveness: Willingness of the provider to be helpful and prompt in providing service.
  4. Assurance: Ability to convey trust and confidence.
  5. Empathy: Sensitivity to the needs of the customer.

Joseph Juran’s Quality Philosophy

Joseph Juran (1998) defines quality as “fitness for use” as defined by the user. Users and their expectations of the product determine quality.

Juran’s Three Spheres of Quality

  1. Quality Control (QC): Focuses on providing analysis and identifying relationships and causes of variation that create lower quality.
  2. Quality Assurance (QA): Focuses on testing and researching activities that guarantee products meet specifications and perform as advertised.
  3. Quality Management (QM): Describes the management processes that tie together the completion, control, and transition of quality activities.

W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points for Management

  1. Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services.
  2. Adopt the new philosophy.
  3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.

    Inspection is too late; the quality (good or bad) is already in the product. Inspection can be useful to gather data on the process, specifically to see if a process has gone out of control and a special cause needs to be investigated. Inspecting to pull out the failed items from production before a customer sees them is a path to failure. If the process is this bad, the process needs to be improved. Quality cannot be inspected into a product or service; it must be built into it.

  4. End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier.
  5. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production, and service.
  6. Institute training on the job.
  7. Adopt and institute leadership.
  8. Drive out fear.
  9. Break down barriers between staff areas.
  10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce.

    Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the workforce. Slogans are a way to say you care about quality without actually demonstrating that you care. Normally, all a slogan does is result in blaming people for not delivering what the slogan promises. To improve results, the system needs to be improved.

  11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.

    We need to eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor, eliminate management by objective (MBO), and eliminate management by numbers/numerical goals. Substitute leadership. If management sets quantitative targets and makes people’s jobs depend on meeting them, they will likely meet the targets, often at the expense of quality.

  12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship and eliminate the annual rating of merit system.
  13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone.
  14. Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation.