Interview some managers at a local company that is pursuing or has pursued ISO 9000 registration. Report on the reasons for achieving registration, the perceived benefits, and the problems the company encountered during the process.
> Interview managers at some local organizations to determine whether they have well-defined missions, visions, and guiding principles. If they do, how are these translated into strategy? If not, what steps should they take?
> Use the Baldrige Organizational Profile questions to prepare an organizational profile for your college or a local organization that would be willing to provide you with the information. Use the format of the Arroyo Fresco case study in the Baldrige Mate
> Work with teachers at a local high school or grade school to identify some students who are having difficulties in school. Apply quality tools to help find the source of the problems and create an improvement plan.
> Search the Internet for websites that contain descriptions and examples of quality improvement methodologies. How do they compare with the ones described in this chapter?
> In small teams, develop cause-and-effect diagrams for the following problems: a. Poor exam grade b. No job offers c. Late for work or school
> Develop a flowchart of the process you use to study for an exam. How might you improve this process?
> Find a local company that is using Six Sigma or lean principles. Write a case study of their experiences, focusing on the challenges they faced during their implementation efforts.
> Identify an important problem around your school or in some related function, such as a student organization, and apply the DMAIC process to develop an improved solution. Use whatever process improvement tools are appropriate.
> Three popular websites for Six Sigma are http:// www.ge.com/sixsigma, http://www.isixsigma.com, and http://asq.org/sixsigma. Explore these sites and consider the following questions. a. How does GE use Six Sigma to enhance customer perception of its pro
> Investigate design-for-environment practices in some of your local industries. Describe company policies and the methods and techniques that they use to address environmental concerns in product design.
> Senior managers at The Morgan Company had developed a new and inspiring mission statement—one that set a new direction for the company with ambitious strategic goals. Management continually emphasized the new strategy and asked employees what they needed
> Prepare a full DFMEA for a casual dining restaurant. Consider failure modes that might occur both in food preparation and in service. Clearly explain and justify your choices for the severity, likelihood, and detection ratings.
> Fill in the following relationship matrix of a House of Quality for a screwdriver. By sampling your classmates, develop priorities for the customer attributes and use these and the relationships to identify key technical requirements to deploy.
> Most children (and many adults) like to assemble and fly balsa-wood gliders. From your own experiences or from interviews with other students, define a set of customer requirements for a good glider. (Even better, buy one and test it to determine these r
> Suppose that you were developing a small pizza restaurant with a dining area and local delivery. Develop a list of customer requirements and technical requirements and try to complete a House of Quality. What service standards might such an operation hav
> Using whatever “market research” techniques are appropriate, define a set of customer attributes for a. Purchasing books at your college bookstore b. A college registration process c. A hotel room used for business d. A hotel room used for family lei
> The web site http://www.paperhelicopterexperiment.com/ describes how to build a paper helicopter to conduct a designed experiment. Choose only 3 factors from the list provided, and build helicopters to identify the best design that keeps the helicopter a
> Devise an experiment similar to the battery performance test case (see the Battery Experiment case that follows) to test different levels of some factor and conduct a statistical analysis of the results. Write up your experiment and results in a report a
> Find some examples of supplier certification processes used by major companies and summarize your findings, focusing on the criteria used and how the processes are implemented.
> Interview a plant manager or quality professional at one or more local companies to see whether they use any poke-yoke approaches to mistake-proof their operations.
> Identify several sources of errors as a student or in your personal life. Develop some poka-yokes that might prevent them.
> Fred Read, the owner of the Freadilunch (pronounced Freddylunch) Restaurant, a suburban, quick service restaurant, was concerned about the loss of several regular customers. He measured the number of empty lunch tables from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. over a fo
> Think of a casual dining restaurant that you frequent. The process of fulfilling customer’s needs and creating a satisfying dining experience begins when the customer walks through the door and ends when the customer leaves. Using process mapping, poka-y
> Barker is a small custom producer of equipment used in various process industries such as chemicals and beverages. Each piece of equipment is customer designed from customer specifications. The process generally consists of five steps: a. Customer quote
> Design an instrument for evaluating the “process focus” of an organization. For example, what characteristics would you look for in firms that have a strong process orientation?
> Design a process for the following activities: a. Preparing for an exam b. Writing a term paper c. Planning a vacation d. Making breakfast for your family e. Washing your car Discuss ways in which both quality and cycle time might be improved.
> Interview a plant manager at a local factory to determine his or her philosophy on process management. What techniques does the company use?
> Does your school survey its faculty and staff to assess issues of engagement, satisfaction, and the work environment? If so, obtain a copy of the survey and analyze it relative to the concepts in this chapter; if not, design one that might be used.
> Research the impacts of the Internet on workforce management practices in an actual firm. One possible approach would be to interview an HR manager at a company that is building e-commerce capability. Another approach might be to visit the websites of se
> Interview some managers at a local company on their approaches to motivation. Summarize their responses and analyze them in the context of motivation theories. Can you provide any suggestions for improving their practices?
> Investigate the extent of team participation at some local companies. What kinds of teams do you find? Do managers believe these teams are effective?
> Survey local companies to determine if and how they use suggestion systems. What levels of participation do they have? Are suggestions tied to rewards and recognitions?
> The Janson Medical Clinic recently conducted a patient satisfaction survey of 100 patients. Using a scale of 1–5, with 1 being “very dissatisfied” and 5 being “very satisfied,â
> Interview managers at a local organization about their workforce-management practices, focusing on engagement and work and job design issues. Report on your perceptions of how well their practices support a high-performance workplace.
> Search some current business periodicals (e.g., Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Business Week) for articles dealing with workforce-management issues. Explain how they relate to the material in this chapter. Are any new approaches or practices emerging?
> Review the most recent list of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” and summarize the best practices of these companies, classifying them into themes such as engagement, work environment, training, and so on. Have any of these companies or their bu
> A number of pizza chains or restaurants are probably located around your college campus. Using a focus group of students, conduct an interview to determine what factors are important in selecting a traditional or pizza restaurant. Once you have identifie
> This exercise provides an experience with developing an affinity diagram for analyzing complaints and would best be performed by the class as a whole.75 Each student writes one or more descriptions of personal experiences of frustration and dissatisfacti
> You have undoubtedly made numerous purchases in retail clothing stores such as the Gap, banana republic, Old Navy, and so on. Develop a customer satisfaction survey based upon the five service quality dimensions discussed in this chapter. You should have
> Gather several customer satisfaction surveys or comment cards from local establishments. Analyze them as to their ability to lead to actionable information that will help the organization, and propose any improvements or redesign you deem appropriate.
> Describe some ways that organizations can improve websites and make them more customer-focused. You might consider examining a variety of websites and identifying “best practices.
> Interview some managers of small businesses to determine how they respond to complaints and use complaint information in their organizations.
> You may have visited or purchased items from large computer and software retail stores. In a group brainstorming session, identify those characteristics of such a store that would be most important to you, and design a customer survey to evaluate custome
> Rockstone makes tires for the automotive market. Employees noticed that there is a great deal of congestion at the shipping dock as pallets of material that had been picked in the warehouse were waiting to be moved by forklifts to outbound tractor-traile
> Based on the information in this chapter, propose new approaches for measuring customer satisfaction for your faculty and instructors that go beyond the traditional course evaluation processes that your school may use
> Find an example of a highly publicized service or product failure in the news (such as unreasonable waiting on a plane on a runway or the poor reception on the first release of the iPhone 4). Research and write a short paper on how the company addressed
> Design customer satisfaction questionnaires for high school students and their parents who take a campus visit and are considering applying to your school.
> Perform some research to examine recent trends in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Which economic sectors show improvement? Which don’t? How has the overall index changed?
> Search the Internet to find information about current registration trends for ISO 9000. How widespread is ISO 9000 in the United States as compared to Europe and other global regions?
> Interview a quality professional at a local company about its quality management system. Consider questions such as: Does it have a quality manual? Is their QMS integrated with other enterprise business systems?
> Design a questionnaire or survey instrument to determine the degree to which an organization is “Demonized.” Explain how you developed the questions.
> Study the annual reports of some major companies issued over a period of several years. Do you see evidence of implementation of the quality principles and practices discussed in Tables 2.2 and 2.3? Table 2.2: Table 2.2:
> Develop a “personal quality checklist” that you would like to achieve each day and analyze the results over an extended period of time. The listing of possible checklist standards might include: Review class notes after each class No text messaging duri
> LT, Inc. started as a small, family-owned company. For a long time, owners managed most of the operations, including billing, and customers were happy Over time, the company grew steadily and acquired plants in the United States and many other countries.
> Interview some managers at a local service organization and summarize the role of people and information technology in providing quality service. How are people and information technology integrated into long-range improvement plans and strategies?
> Interview some key managers at a nearby manufacturing company and construct a diagram similar to showing the company’s key functions and their relationships. Summarize the major quality concerns of each function
> Visit the website for the American Society for Quality (www.ASQ.org) and write a short report on the services and resources it offers to quality professionals.
> Conduct some research on quality practices that is focused on a particular country or global region. Summarize your findings in a two- to three-page report.
> Table 3.4 is a hypothetical list of customer requirements as determined through a focus group conducted by an airline. Develop an affinity diagram, classify these requirements into appropriate categories, and design a questionnaire to survey customers. B
> Consider the following customer expectations for a fast-food (quick-service) restaurant. Classify them as dissatisfies, satisfiers, or exciters/delighters. Justify your reasoning. a. Special prices on certain days b. Food is safe to eat c. Hot food is
> Classify the following customer requirements for a hotel using the five key dimensions of service quality—reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy, or responsiveness.73 Hotel equipment is always functioning Hotel staff is knowledgeable to answer gues
> Ski magazine conducts and annual survey of readers to rate ski resorts. They used the following attributes as the basis for the survey: snow, grooming, terrain variety, challenge, value, lifts, service, weather, access, on-mountain food, lodging, dining,
> The current process for fulfilling a room service request at the Lexmark hotel can be described as follows. After the tray is prepared at the room service station, the server proceeds to the room, knocks on the door, sets up the meal, has the customer si
> Patients for a hospital pre-admission testing process were experiencing excessive wait times. A flowchart for the process was developed and is shown in Figure 9.25. Determine where bottlenecks might be inherent in this process and suggest possible improv
> Montvalley Short-Haul Lines, Inc. (MSL) is a small independently owned narrow-gauge railway in Montana. It supplies contract transportation services to many mining firms, hauling ore and mining equipment. One of its principal customers, Cranford Consolid
> Vera source Microprocessor Corporation (VMC) sells 2,000 specialized microprocessor chips each month at a price of $1,500 each. Variable costs amount to $1,500,000, and fixed costs are $500,000. Currently the company has a defect rate of 8 percent (which
> A company has four machines, each of which produces 200 parts per hour. The machines run 24 hours/day, 365 days per year. How many defective parts can be made each year to ensure a sigma level of 4.5?
> Nanos Electron, Inc. manufactures 75,000 circuit boards per month. A random sample of 800 boards is inspected every week for three characteristics. During a recent week, four defects were found for one characteristic, two defects were found for another c
> Expand Table 9.2 for sigma levels from 3.0 to 6.0 in increments of 0.1 on a spreadsheet. Construct a chart showing dpmo as a function of the sigma level. TABLE 9.4:
> During one month, Invoke processed 25,000 invoices for Alpha Corp, 23,000 for Beta Corp, and 8,000 for Gamma Corp. Of these, 205 of the Alpha, 175 of the Beta, and 103 of the Gamma invoices had to be reprocessed for errors. What is the overall nonconform
> Santucci’s Restaurant suspects that customer wait time is related to its customer satisfaction ratings on surveys customers receive with their bill. It has data for 25 customers, available in the C09 Problem Data workbook. Use the appropriate tool to ana
> Analysis of customer complaints at the Lauren Elizabeth Apparel Company revealed errors in five categories, such as billing, shipping, etc. Data can be found in the C09 Problem Data workbook. Construct a Pareto diagram for these data. What conclusions ca
> Never flounder Fish Company advertises that 99.4 percent of their fish were caught within the past 36 hours. How many dpmo does this claim represent? At what sigma level is this process operating?
> In a Delta Widgets, Inc. process, the production rate (parts/hour) was thought to affect the number of defectives found during a subsequent inspection. To test this theory, the production rate was varied and the numbers of defects were collected for the
> Deuce Printing Company realized that they were losing customers and orders due to various delays and errors. In order to get to the root cause of the problem, they decided to track problems that might be contributing to customer dissatisfaction. The list
> The Thomas Jefferson Nickel was first produced in 1938. The United States Mint produces all U.S. coins at their Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Denver, Colorado, facilities. According to the U.S. Code, a nickel has a nominal specification weight of 5.00
> Howie Fenton, a senior technology consultant for the National Association for Printing Leadership, relates the following in a blog: I ran into Mary Schilling recently at an industry event and congratulated her on her new blog on the Printing Impressions
> A process at Print wright, Inc.’s largest facility is used to make plastic gears for a computer printer. They have been receiving numerous complaints that the gears are jamming. The data provided in the C09 Problem Data workbook were gathered by a qualit
> The times required for 50 trainees in an electronics course at ElecktronTech to assemble a component used in a computer were measured. These are provided in the C09 Problem Data workbook. Construct a histogram of the data. What recommendations for improv
> A Six Sigma analyst in Laneri United Bank suspected that errors in counting and manually strapping cash into bundles were related to the number of weeks that employees had been employed on that job. Data collected are available in the C09 Problem Data wo
> A catalog order-filling process at Cats Catalog Company for personalized printed products for pet owners can be described as follows:54 Telephone orders are taken over a 12-hour period each day. Orders are collected from each person at the end of the day
> An order fulfillment process at M. Smith & Sons’ distribution center begins by printing an order label, placing it on a box, placing the box on a conveyor, scanning the label, removing the box from the conveyor, finding the item in the warehouse, placing
> The maintenance of products such as aircraft engines is part of a complex supply chain. Distribution centers fulfill orders for spare parts to customers around the world and typically run on a 24/7 basis. Each day, as many as 4,000 different SKUs are shi
> A large telecom call center that received over 100,000 calls each day applied Lean Six Sigma and identified root causes for several inefficiencies that were observed. These were (1) many agents were slow typists, resulting in long resolution times; (2) n
> Place write, Inc., an independent outplacement service, helps unemployed executives find jobs. One of the major activities of the service is pre paring resumes. Three word processors work at the service typing resumes and cover letters. Together they han
> Multisigma Corp. has a process they believe is operating near a six-sigma level and want to verify this. If the specification for a critical part in the process is 2.80 cm 6 0.10 and the standard deviation for the process is 0.02, at what sigma level is
> The Excel workbook C08 Problem Data provides data on quality losses at Sonoco Paper Mill. Find the percentage of cost for each category, and the cumulative percentages when the categories are sorted by decreasing costs. Construct an appropriate Excel cha
> The Morelia Mortgage Company (MMC) is a mediumsized mortgage lender that has continued to do well, despite the “meltdown” in the mortgage lending industry. Prior to the economic downturn, MMC was a principal supplier of lending services to Southwestern D
> Reship Solutions, Inc. has a distribution center in Cincinnati where it receives and breaks down bulk orders from suppliers’ factories and ships out products to retail customers. Prepare a pie or bar chart showing the different quality cost categories an
> Compute a labor cost base index for the data in the Excel workbook C08 Problem Data for Miami Valley Aircraft Service Co. Analyze the quality cost information and prepare a memo to management explaining your conclusions. (See the supplementary reading Qu
> Classify the cost elements for the Impressive Printing Company in the Excel workbook C08 Problem Data into the proper quality cost categories and find the total quality cost by category and percentage of total quality cost by category. Prepare a pie char
> Determine, using Figure 8.50, the appropriate sample size for detecting: a. A 1-sigma shift in the mean with a 0.80 probability b. A 2-sigma shift with 0.95 probability c. A 2.5-sigma shift with 0.90 probability
> Analyze the cost data in the Excel workbook C08 Problem Data for the Cost-cutting Co. Create a chart to help you explain the results. What are the implications of these data for management?
> Top Billers processes bills for customers. Bills can contain errors due to a number of causes, such as incorrect amounts, wrong dates, wrong customer information, etc. The quality manager for Top Billers decided to examine all bills processed over 25 wee
> A quality consultant was asked to analyze the data from order errors at the Audubon Books, Inc., distribution center as shown in the C08 Problem Data workbook. Any order can have one or more errors such as wrong item, incorrect customer information, etc.
> Pharma Express, Inc., a mail-order prescription drug vendor, measured the number of errors per standard 200-line order being picked in their distribution center as provided in the C08 Problem Data workbook. Compute the control limits for a c-chart using
> Federal Scanline, Inc. uses a scanner on a conveyor line that scans 1,000 packages per hour. Packages which have defective labels or detectable damage to the package are automatically offloaded and handchecked. Defects might be a number missing from a zi
> Construct an np-chart for the Dennis Manufacturing Company using the data in the C08 Problem Data workbook and the np-chart Excel template. The data represent the number of defective parts found in 30 samples, each of size 50. Explain the results.
> The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) monitors and evaluates health care providers according to strict standards and guidelines. Improvement in the quality of care is a principal concern. Hospitals are required to iden
> Compute the control limits for an np-chart using the data in Problem 42 for the Full Life Insurance Co. using the appropriate formulas. Then verify your calculations using the np-chart Excel template. Explain the relationship between the control limits f
