It is today that we recognize the importance of customer's point-of-view but it was Juran who many years ago gave the idea that the perception of quality lies in the mind of customers rather than the producer. "According to the founders of TQM, the five interventions define the core of total quality management. Knowledge of customer requirements provides a test for considering and evaluating process changes. Supplier partnerships ensure that materials entering the organization are of acceptable quality. Cross-functional teams bring the full spectrum of relevant information and expertise to bear on decisions about system wide problems. Scientific methods and statistical analyses provide teams with trustworthy data to use in their decision making. And process management heuristics can improve the quality of the decision-making process itself" (Hackman 309+) Project by Project Approach: Juran is also famous for his step-by-step approach to resolving a problem. According to his thinking all the problems and issued can be resolve at once. Instead a project by project and incremental approach is suggested by Dr. Juran. He suggested this approach because quality issues keep on haunting management and can never be avoided all together and so an incremental approach prepares management for quality as an ongoing process rather than a one time issue.

TQM & Strategic Management

Total quality management is now one of the most important concepts of the modern strategic management. TQM is about making incremental improvements in the processes and their flow is generally from bottom to top as opposed to other concepts regarding bringing about radical changes in the process designs where the flow is generally from top to bottom. Generally, in a management scenario operations level is avoided and TQM inculcates a strategic view at the operations level as the improvements in the processes can only be brought about if departments interact with each other. In the absence of this strategic interaction among departments, failed projects could be produced for example technological advancement brought about by the R&D department can be of no use if the firm does not have or cannot acquire the capabilities to produce or implement it. Hence, inter-organizational collaboration is one of the requirements of successful process improvement utilizing organizations resources and capabilities. Furthermore, TQM should not be considered as ends instead of means to achieve overall strategic goal. Overall strategy should be the guiding force behind TQM because without overall strategy managers cannot decide which operations are important. "Juran defines quality as 'the process of identifying and administering the activities needed to achieve the quality objectives of an organization'. He begins from two principles. First, managers have to realize that they, not the workers, must shoulder most of the responsibility for the performance of their companies. Second, they must understand the financial benefits that can be realized once quality is made a priority. He thus turns quality into a management issue first and foremost. Improving quality, he says, requires a systematic, company-wide approach; piecemeal efforts by individual teams or business units will not work" (Witzel).

Exemplary Organizations

Many companies have...

There are many certificates and awards that honor the excellence in management of quality. Application of quality management in a number of organizations has resulted in standards for different organizations to follow. Benchmarking in many organizations have also become part of the total quality effort by organizations. A best practice of an organization also provides it with unique and distinctive competence and cost/benefit impact. Therefore the transfer and sharing of the best practice organization wide becomes necessary for attaining a competitive edge. Benchmarking attempts to improve business processes by analyzing the top-notch approaches of others and adapting it to one's own organization to achieve a competitive lead. Best practices and benchmarking can give an organization strategic, operational, and financial advantage. Globe metallurgical Inc. is one company that actually worked on this concept of process improvement and ended up getting Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. "Globe Metallurgical Inc., the first small company to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, carefully studied the financial returns it realized from investing in efforts to improve its processes both large and small. Managers at the company concluded that the rate of return was 40 to 1" (Miller 159-175).
Conclusions

Juran can be considered one of the key figures in management theory evolution. The management in general and quality management in particular that we see today is because of the efforts of the management gurus like Dr. Juran. His own powerful and analytical thinking along with the efforts of his contemporaries has given us new dimension in management. Today we have strategic management, total quality management, six-sigma approach, core process reengineering and many ground breaking concepts in the field of management because of the core work done by people like Dr. Juran. Today we even criticize different quality management approaches, the field is being explored and the research is being conducted to make further better use of his concepts and theories. Many organizations have been benefited using quality as a way of management and are roaring successes and many are still bracing them and they all are taking forward the cause of this management guru.