Building on the experiences of scores of companies and hundreds of managers, J.M. Juran, the world-renowned quality pioneer, presents a new, exhaustively comprehensive approach to planning, setting, and reaching quality goals. Employing three case examples which encompass the three major sectors of the economy -- service, manufacturing, and support, he offers a practical plan for companies to achieve strategic, market-driven goals by following a structural approach to planning quality.

Quality, according to Juran, has become a prerequisite for business success. He cites the loss of market share, failure of products, and waste as results of poor quality planning. Juran provides a set of universal steps which can be used in the basic managerial process to establish quality goals, identify customers, determine customer needs, provide measurement, and develop process features and controls to improve business tactics.

The author gives new emphasis to setting quality goals, planning in "multifunctional" processes, establishing data bases for quality planning, motivating managers and the work force, and introducing quality planning into organizations.

The subject of management for quality has undergone rapid and drastic change as a result of competition in the marketplace and the vulnerability of industrialized societies that depend heavily on the quality of goods and services. In this companion volume to his acclaimed "Juran on Planning for Quality," J.M. Juran provides top-level managers with the specific, field-tested methods they need to successfully lead their companies on the quest for superior quality.

Managers have long recognized that the most sound response to a competitive challenge is to become more competitive. Today, informed managers also realize that quality improvement is the best source of competitive advantage. They know that return on investment in quality improvement projects is among the highest available. Yet, the means by which management can supply the leadership necessary to attain quality goals remains elusive. J.M. Juran has drawn on the experiences of thousands of chief executives in companies around the world to create a clear plan of action applicable to any industry, whether service or manufacturing.

The famous "Juran Trilogy," clearly presented step-by-step, shows how to apply the familiar business concepts of planning, control, and improvement to quality leadership. For each concept, Dr. Juran provides a succinct and proven series of actions. He gives criteria for selecting project-by-project improvements and mobilizing a team to carry them out. He also describes a realistic timetable of implementation and directs the formation of an ongoing quality council whose job is to launch, coordinate, and "institutionalize" annual quality improvement. The membership of this council, as Dr. Juraninsists, must come from the ranks of senior managers; the stakes are too high for upper managers not to personally become the leaders and members of this vital council. Using real-world case examples of highly profitable quality improvements in such companies as Bethlehem Steel and Florida Power & Light, Dr. Juran illustrates how to guide a company into a continuing steep rate of improvement. The key, as Dr. Juran emphasizes, is that quality must be implemented from the top down. This essential handbook makes executive leadership the key to a company's quality revolution -- and to producing the real cost benefits over both the short and long run that superior quality brings.

Juran contends that the manager's basic function is to create change ("breakthrough") or prevent it ("control"), and demonstrates that each process is unvaryingly governed by a universal sequence of events. You'll learn the issues that arise, virtually without fail, whenever organizations introduce change; how to master an unvarying sequence of events that will enable you to overcome resistance to change, and break through to ever higher levels of performance; how to control any action or project under your supervision; how to achieve breakthrough in every area that determines a company's success - from attitudes ... to knowledge... to action; and when it's better to initiate change and when it's better to prevent it. Regardless of your field or product - whether you are a company president, superintendent, department head, foreperson, or a supervisor - this book will prove to be of immeasurable value to you. It is a book written for everyone who must achieve results, whether through the efforts of other people or through their own efforts.