The long-term success of an organization depends on the methods used to deliberately shape a firm's approach to maintaining quality standards. While a systematic approach to managing and improving quality using statistical tools can be very effective, attaining high levels of quality often depends on organizational culture and the quality of executive leadership. This Reading begins with an explanation of the dimensions of quality, focusing on the distinctions between performance quality and conformance quality. The next section explores the issues connected with the cost of quality by exploring the question: How should organizations think about the cost and value of different levels of conformance quality? It concludes with the topic of problem-solving in an operations setting. Fast and effective problem-solving is essential for preventing problems from getting worse over time.
The student is starting his or her own business, baking make-to-order cookies. Basic times of each operation are laid out and the student is asked to determine the consequences for the operating system. Serves as an exercise and review of concepts such as capacity, bottlenecks, and throughput times. Students should be able to make several useful suggestions for improving the system.
Fire fighting is an old, familiar way of doing business, especially when developing new products and ramping up manufacturing. But fire fighting consumes an organization's resources and damages productivity. What factors underlie this destructive pattern? Fire fighting derives from what seems like a reasonable set of rules--investigate all problems, for example, or assign the most difficult problems to your best troubleshooter. Ultimately, however, fire-fighting organizations fail to solve problems adequately and forgo so many opportunities that overall performance plummets. Some companies never fight fires, even though they have just as much work and just as many resource constraints as other companies do. They have strong problem-solving cultures. They don't tackle a problem unless they're committed to understanding its root cause and finding a valid solution. And they don't reward fire-fighting behavior. Transforming a fire-fighting organization into a problem-solving one is not easy. But there are tactical, strategic, and cultural methods for pulling your company out of fire-fighting mode.
Summarizes how to construct and use statistical process control charts. Gives several examples. Discusses tolerances using control charts for debugging.
Intended for distribution during class, this case contains one set of answers to the (A1) case. It introduces the concept of a Gantt chart and discusses issues raised by the case such as the value of labor flexibility. The open-ended questions in the (A1) case are only partially answered to encourage further student creativity.
The student is starting his or her own business, baking make-to-order cookies. Basic times of each operation are laid out and the student is asked to determine the consequences for the operating system. Serves as an exercise and review of concepts such as capacity, bottlenecks, and throughput times. Students should be able to make several useful suggestions for improving the system. The case ends with a series of open-ended questions.
Describes systematic methods for process debugging and improvement, based on statistical quality control. Examples are from manufacturing settings, but techniques are also useful for services and sales, and to quantity improvement as well as quality improvement.