Example Of The Excellent Manufacturing Company Case Study

Essay

The Excellent Manufacturing Company has recently hired a quality manager to the Quality Department. Company leadership has finally decided to improve the quality control methods that are currently been used in the Production department. The process operators have taken quality seriously and using their own methods for improving the quality of the product. Unfortunately their methods are not really working and the amount of customer complaints seriously increased. As last year the EMC had only 56 complaints and during first four month of the current year company got already 49 complaints. More than that a lot of bad quality plastic inserts accumulate in the Plasti-Brack assembly, which doesn’t seem to be a problem for the workers, but affects the production costs This situation has to be changed by the new quality manager.
Our second step is to measure and to analyze the currently exciting production process. We have to define the key aspects that influence the quality of our product and carefully measure them. This can be temperature, time, the amount of the raw material, the amount of the reduced material in the raw material used during the production process. As well as the amount of the items that an operator can make in a minute and in a hour. The next step is to analyze the data to investigate and verify cause –and-effect relationships. For example, is there the correlation between the amount of items going through assembly stage and the amount of final customer complaints? Or maybe the temperature in the presses affects the amount of brackets with sharp edges. We can try to change concreate technical features and specifications to improve the production process.
Personally I think that is might be useful to work out the concreate check list for improving the process of visual analysis of the items during the visual inspection on the assembly stage. The reason is that there might be a direct correlation between the experience of the operator and the amount of the defected items / customer complains. In case all the operators will have the save quality parameters list and would use it during inspection process, this will most likely lead to decreasing the customers complaints for the item produced during the working time of the new operators.
The forth step is to improve or optimize the production process. This is a stage where we have to implement our technical characteristics (temperature, time, amount of items per minute, etc.) and also implement our quality check list on all stages. I suggest that on the assembly station an operator would check according to the agreed points both the plastic insert and the assembly. After that at the Machine Bulk Packaging station operators would optionally select a couple of items from the line for additional check out.
The last step is to make sure that all the changes were implemented and are currently working. At this stage we measure and asses the technical characteristics (temperature, time, amount of items per minute, etc.) and check the operators if they follow the established procedures.
Another useful issue is implementing a Statistical Process Control (SPC), which is most commonly used for monitoring and controlling the process. According to SPC we have to analyze the process and define the “Common Causes” and “Special causes” and then we can focus on these causes to work out the possible changes plan and implement it. “Common causes” can be temperature in the presses or the percentage of the re-processed material in the raw material. “Special causes” – electricity shut down, operator suddenly felt ill and could not continue working.
I would strongly recommend to use the control charts to differ “Common causes” from “Special causes” and to comprehensively assess the situation. Control charts could be useful at the measuring stage of the DMAIC project methodology.
Quality management is usually a systematic approach to producing goods or services. Systematic doesn’t always mean complicated, but when properly designed and operated it would always bear fruit. If all the proposed steps will be implemented, the EMC will start a new life with more and more satisfied customers.