Part A: Quality planning
Introduction to quality planning
Key takeaways
- KS ISO 9000 defines quality planning as the part of quality management focused on setting quality objectives and specifying the operational processes and related resources needed to achieve them.
- Juran's roadmap runs from establishing the project and its goals, through identifying customers, discovering and translating their needs and setting units of measure, to developing product features, process features and process controls, then transferring the plan to operations.
- A quality plan applies the standing quality management system to one specific object, such as a contract or a one-off export order; planning decides what conformity means, control checks whether it has been achieved.
- Planning is the only stage at which quality can be built in rather than inspected in, and the cost of correcting a decision rises by roughly an order of magnitude at each later stage.
- Clause 6.2.2 requires the organisation to determine what will be done, what resources are needed, who is responsible, when it will be completed and how the results will be evaluated.
Quality planning is the first of Juran's three managerial processes, and it is where quality is decided rather than discovered. Everything a control chart later detects and everything an audit later reports was determined at the planning stage, which is why this paper places planning before risk rather than after it.
What quality planning is
KS ISO 9000 defines quality planning as the part of quality management focused on setting quality objectives and specifying the necessary operational processes and related resources to achieve those objectives. Three elements are in that definition and all three are examinable.
Juran's quality planning roadmap is the standard practical model, and it is the sequence a candidate should be able to reproduce.
- Establish the project and its goals
- Identify the customers, both external and internal
- Discover the customers' needs, stated, implied and unstated
- Translate those needs into the organisation's own language, as measurable characteristics
- Establish units of measure and means of measurement, since a need that cannot be measured cannot be planned for
- Develop the product or service features that meet the needs
- Develop the process features able to produce those product features consistently
- Establish process controls, and transfer the plan to operations
Why quality planning matters
- It is the only stage at which quality can be built in rather than inspected in, and the cost of correcting a decision rises by roughly an order of magnitude at each subsequent stage
- It determines the design quality covered in Quality Management Systems, under quality requirements, so a planning failure produces a product that conforms perfectly to a specification nobody wanted
- It converts customer needs into measurable characteristics, without which no objective can be set and no control can operate
- It identifies the resources required in time to obtain them, rather than discovering the gap during production
- It is where risks and opportunities are identified, which is why KS ISO 9001 places risk-based thinking in clause 6, the planning clause
- It provides the baseline against which performance is later evaluated under clause 9, since without a plan there is nothing to evaluate against
- It is a requirement: clause 6.2.2 requires the organisation to determine what will be done, what resources will be required, who will be responsible, when it will be completed, and how the results will be evaluated
The cost of a planning failure, by the stage at which it is caught
A Kenyan manufacturer of school furniture wins a county contract for
3,000 desks. The specification is silent on timber moisture content.
Stage at which the omission is caught, and the cost of fixing it:
1. At planning (specification review)
Add a moisture requirement and a test method to the
specification and the supplier order.
Cost: 2 hours of an engineer's time = KES 3,000
2. At purchasing (before the timber is bought)
Renegotiate the supply order and add incoming testing.
Cost: renegotiation plus test rig hire = KES 85,000
3. In production (after machining has started)
Stop, quarantine, re-source timber, re-machine 900 desks.
Cost: scrap, rework, idle labour, delay = KES 1,240,000
4. After delivery (desks warp in the first dry season)
Recall, replace, transport, county penalty, reputational
damage and probable loss of the next contract.
Cost: replacement 3,000 desks at KES 4,200 plus transport
and liquidated damages = KES 14,900,000
Ratio between stage 1 and stage 4 = 14,900,000 / 3,000
= roughly 5,000 to 1
The rule of thumb usually quoted is a factor of ten per stage, and
the arithmetic here is consistent with it over four stages. The
examinable point is that the cheapest quality intervention available
to any organisation is a competent specification review, and it is
the one most often skipped because it produces nothing visible.
Strategic significance
- Quality objectives must be compatible with the strategic direction of the organisation, which is a requirement of clause 5.2 on the quality policy and clause 6.2 on objectives, so quality planning is a component of strategic planning rather than a parallel activity
- It determines the markets the organisation can serve, because market access frequently depends on a certification or a standard that must be planned and resourced years ahead
- It determines the cost position, since the cost of poor quality is decided at the planning stage and then merely incurred
- It shapes capability: a decision to plan for a tighter tolerance is a decision to acquire the process capability, the measurement capability and the competence to hold it
- It manages strategic risk, because the risks identified in quality planning are frequently the same risks that appear in the enterprise risk register of Enterprise Risk Management
- It is where the organisation decides what it will not do, which is a strategic act: declining an order the process cannot hold is a planning decision, and taking it anyway is the origin of most quality crises
- It creates the evidence base for strategy, since the measurement systems established during planning are what later supply the data on which strategic decisions rest
Link the objective to the strategy explicitly
Questions in this chapter frequently ask you to set quality objectives for an organisation. Do not present them as free-standing. Show the trace: strategic objective, the quality objective derived from it, the process that will deliver it, the resource it needs, the owner and the date. That trace is what clause 6.2.2 requires and what the mark scheme is built on.
Self-check
Define quality planning as KS ISO 9000 defines it, and outline Juran's quality planning roadmap. (10 marks)
Explain why a quality planning failure is more expensive than a quality control failure, and illustrate with a Kenyan example. (8 marks)
Show worked answer
Definition and roadmap (10 marks: 3 for the definition, 7 for the roadmap).
Quality planning is the part of quality management focused on setting quality objectives and specifying the necessary operational processes and related resources to achieve those objectives. Three elements follow: deciding what is to be achieved in measurable terms; determining the processes, sequence, controls and acceptance criteria that will achieve it; and determining the people, infrastructure, environment, measuring equipment and knowledge those processes require.
Juran's quality planning roadmap:
1. Establish the project and its goals, so that the planning effort has a defined object.
2. Identify the customers, external and internal, since every process delivers to somebody.
3. Discover the customers' needs, including needs that are implied or unstated rather than only those written into the order.
4. Translate those needs into the organisation's own technical language as measurable characteristics.
5. Establish units of measure and the means of measurement, because a need that cannot be measured cannot be planned for, controlled or evidenced.
6. Develop the product or service features that meet the needs.
7. Develop the process features capable of producing those product features consistently, which is a question of process capability and not only of method.
8. Establish process controls and transfer the plan to operations, so that the people who will run it hold it rather than the planners.
Why planning failure costs more (8 marks: 4 for the reasoning, 4 for the example).
Reasoning: a control failure produces non-conforming output from a correct specification, and it is detected by the control system itself, usually within the process, so the loss is confined to the material and time between the last good check and the detection. A planning failure produces conforming output from a wrong specification, so nothing in the control system detects it: every check passes, because the product matches what it was told to match. It is therefore detected only by the customer, at the far end of the value chain, after the whole batch or the whole contract has been produced and delivered. The cost of correction rises by roughly an order of magnitude at each stage between the decision and its discovery, so a defect that costs shillings to prevent at specification review costs thousands to correct in production and millions to correct after delivery. A planning failure also affects everything made to that specification rather than one batch, and it can require redesign, re-tooling and recall rather than rework.
Example: a Kenyan manufacturer of school furniture supplies 3,000 desks to a county under a specification that omits any requirement for timber moisture content. Every desk passes incoming inspection, dimensional check and final inspection, because none of those checks tests something the specification does not require. The desks warp in the first dry season. The correction is replacement of the entire consignment together with transport and liquidated damages, running to millions of shillings, whereas adding a moisture requirement and a test method at specification review would have cost a couple of hours of engineering time. A control failure on the same contract, say a batch of desks assembled with the wrong fastener, would have been caught at final inspection and cost a few hours of rework on the affected units.