Quality Management and Location Planning

Quality Management and Location Planning

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Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a business strategy used to improve business profitability, efficiency, and effectiveness to meet or exceed the needs and expectations of clients (Aboulola, 2018). It focuses on better understanding of the requirements of customers, improvement of business systems throughout an organization, as well as enhancing its financial performance. Six Sigma is utilized to improve a firm’s processes, products, and services in areas, such as production, marketing, sales, product development, and finance (Stevenson, 2018). It is attained by comprehending the underlying processes, and eradicating or minimizing waste and defects.

The benefits of Six Sigma include creation of robust processes and products, reduction of cost and waste, and improvement of delivery and quality (Gijo et al., 2011). Other benefits involve enhancing an organization’s competitive position, an understanding of the requirements of customers, as well as attaining sustained competitive advantage using continuous improvement of a company’s business systems. Further, the objectives of Six Sigma can be achieved through in-depth knowledge of project management, engineering, and statistics (Garza-Reyes et al., 2010). It is only through reduced defects that improved operational efficiency can be achieved.

Problem for Improvement and Objective/Desired Outcome

The concerns of hygiene in different areas of life, such as gardening, extreme weather, food-handling and health care have increased the demand for rubber gloves. This has also been blown by the spread of COVID-19, which has made it mandatory for people to wear masks and gloves when handling things in public. Therefore, the demand for gloves has stretched the production capacity for manufacturers across the country. One such manufacturer is Carolina Glove Company, a manufacturer and distributor of gloves for consumer, retail, and industrial use, based in Conover, North Carolina. (Carolina Glove, 2020)

Although the company’s products are made with the finest available materials and assembled by experts, lately customers have complained of defects on the “Medium” (M) size gloves. There were a lot of returns in the recent batch of the medium-sized gloves shipped to customers in the neighboring states. Customers cited defects, such as being misshaped, sticky, quality defects, for example, stains and holes. The problem has cost the company time, materials, and capital leading to customer dissatisfaction, which has negatively impacted its reputation.

The objective/desired outcome of will entail reducing the defects by 70% by using Six Sigma into the manufacturing process of the medium-sized gloves to help Carolina Glove Company to minimize defects per million opportunities (DPMO) and improve its Sigma level. The company will also ensure that the product meets the consumers’ demand for value, comfort, and performance once the defects have been removed.

Metrics to Measure Success

Measuring success would entail defining and selecting the effective metrics to eradicate the major defects which need reducing in the company’s medium-sized gloves. The metrics would include the number of defects per type and defects per unit (DPU). DPU involves the basis for calculating the Defects per Million Opportunities and rolled throughput yield (Aboulola, 2018). This would be attained by dividing the total defects by total units. Other metrics would be used to compare the before and after conditions of the manufacturing process of the gloves. These metrics would include the Sigma level of the process, and quality level measured using Defects per Million Opportunities. The metrics would help identify defects and the areas where the process requires improvements.

The amount of time taken to produce the gloves would also be used as a metric in this process, taking into effect the amount of processing time against the process idle time. Time metric would be used to ensure that the production of the non-defective medium-sized gloves reaches customers on time and to satisfy the demand (Stevenson, 2018). It would also measure whether the product is living up to expectations. The quality metric would quantify issues concerning the process errors that need to be revised to enhance the customers’’ experience.

Process of Determining the Root Cause

The process would involve an analysis of the system (i.e., the glove manufacturing process) to pinpoint how to reduce the defects and the gap between the recent performance and the desired goals (Garza-Reyes et al., 2010). The management would perform data analysis to investigate and ascertain the root cause of the problem. They would identify and prioritize improvement opportunities during the analysis stage using various techniques and approaches, such as design or experiments (DOE), cause-and-effect diagrams, brainstorming, process mapping, statistical process control, hypothesis testing, and simulation (Sweis et al., 2019). Therefore, the management would illustrate the manufacturing process using flowcharts to understand the process and gain a clear picture of the manufacturing stages (Aboulola, 2018).

An analysis would be carried out to ascertain the quality of the defective gloves. Brainstorming sessions would be held to identify the possible causes using cause-and-effect diagrams, which provide the relationship between the effect and possible causes of the effect. The diagram would be used to uncover the possible causes to pave way for ideas for improvements. The cause-and-effect diagram would involve method, manpower, machinery, measurement, and material, as well as environment (Gijo et al., 2011).

After analysis of the possibilities, the team would find the causes of the defect, for example, stages and operations, such as leaching, dipping, and vulcanizing within the process might have caused the leakages. Further, process factors, such as conveyor’s speed and oven’s temperature could have had a direct impact on the defective gloves.

Tools to Follow through the Six Sigma Strategy Steps

The tools that would be used in the process include the Design of Experiments, Pareto chart, cause-and-effect diagram, and two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) (Aboulola, 2018). The cause-and-effect diagram involves a systematic questioning method to arrive at the root cause of the problem by giving the relationship between the effect and cause of such effect. The resulting diagram uncovers the root causes and provides ideas for improvement (Gijo et al., 2011). In the Carolina Gloves scenario, the tool indicated that oven’s temperature and conveyor’s speed caused the defects.

The Pareto analysis would help pinpoint the defects to ensure that the team prioritizes the most immediate problem (i.e., leakages). Since leakages might have led to most of the problems, the team would focus on reducing leaking gloves defect. The DOE, on the other hand, would investigate multiple-factor effects to enhance the process yield, lower costs, and reduce variability (Garza-Reyes et al., 2010). The DOE would investigate whether the factors have a negative impact on the process. ANOVA would help analyze the results of the experiments using parameters, such as speed, temperature, and revolutions per minute. It would show what would happen when the speed and temperature are varied.

Conclusion

Six Sigma helps eliminate defects in the processes of developing products and services. This paper sought to examine a scenario where a rubber glove manufacturing company has received returns of defective gloves from customers in the medium-sized category. As such, it seeks to get to the root cause of the problem to rectify it to meet the customers’ expectations and needs as well as reduce costs and increase profitability. The metrics used would include the number of defects per type and defects per unit (DPU), time, Sigma level of the process, and quality level measured using Defects per Million Opportunities. From the analysis of the root cause of the defect, conveyor’s speed and oven’s temperature were found to have caused the problem. As such, the tools employed in the process included the Design of Experiments, Pareto chart, cause-and-effect diagram, and two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA).

References

Aboulola, O. I. (2018). A new model for spatial analysis site selection and decision making for small retail facilities: A case study for Starbucks-Seattle. Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, 13(3), 10-21.

Carolina Glove (2020). About Carolina Glove and Safety Company. Retrieved, http://www.carolinaglove.com/about-carolina-glove-safety.htmlGarza-Reyes, J. A., Oraifige, I., Soriano-Meier, H., Harmanto, D., & Rocha-Lona, L. (2010). “An empirical application of Six Sigma and DMAIC methodology for business process improvement.” Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing (FAIM), San Francisco, CA, US,12-14 July, pp. 92-100.

Gijo, E. V., Scaria, J. and Antony, J. (2011). Application of Six Sigma methodology to reduce defects of a grinding process. Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 27(8), 1221-1234.

Stevenson, W. (2018). Operations management (13th ed.). McGraw-Hill Irwin.

Sweis, R. J., Ismaeil, A. S., Amayreh, I., & Al-Sayyed, N. (2019). The relationship between total quality management (TQM) implementation and organization performance: Evidence from the air-lines companies in UAE. International Journal of Information, Business and Management, 11(1), 58-79.