Mpcp

3 Introduction

3.1 Group Presentation

This first part of Assignment 1 includes two group presentations. The First presentation was about “Core Concept of Quality”, “Quality Philosophies”, and “Economics (cost) of Quality”. The second group presentation was supposed to be about “Aspects of Good Quality Management Practices”, “Quality Stan-dards”, and “Quality Control Systems or “Quality Tools and Techniques” re-spectively. This part of the Assignment has already been completed and we passed a hardcopy of the work to the module leader.

3.2 Individual Final Written Report

This Individual written report will be about the quality improvement at Link plc. It will describe and critically appraise a quality strategy for the company, based upon the concepts which I explored during the semester. Next to the theory we worked out in the module, the given information in the case study need to be taken into consideration when writing this report. The whole strategy will de-pend on the characteristics of the company description given by the Managing Director (MD).

In the beginning I am going to present the current situation and reveal the main problems and their influence on quality. The problems need to be analyzed to collect information for the founding of a new strategy.

After this analysis I will use the given information to define a quality strategy which fits best to the needs of Link plc.

My report will then finish with a brief critical appraisal about the used tech-niques and the main findings.

4 Final Report

4.1 Analysis - Problems

4.1.1 Current situation

The “Case Company” Link plc. manufactures 3 different types of mechanical couplings for linking electric motors with gearboxes and drive shafts. As the

Managing Director explained the three products his Company makes have cer-tain characteristics which are listed below:

Product Characteristics

1  60% sales, produce to stock

 Heavily changed organisation of manufacturing system

 First class service

 Still quality issues!

2  30% sales, standard design, fast delivery, premium price

 Reorganised manufacture

 Improved support

3  10% sales, new product, custom design

 Raised the price пÑ" well growing sales

Table 1: Characteristics of Product patterns

With these Products they are going to achieve ₤8.2m turnover in the end of this year. This would be 10% more than last year. Even better looks the profit forecast which is going to be over 50% higher than it was in 2005. To make it more clear I drew a graph which shows the sales and related profit development since 2003.

Figure 1: Sales and Profit since 2003

As the Graph shows, the profit fell down in 2003 and it was on a minimum in 2004. But during the time where the new managing director changed the or-ganisational system, they raised the profit up to Ð'Ј15,000.

But this rising Profit might only be safe for the moment because the company got several main problems which I will talk about on the next few pages.

To make it a bit easier to understand the happenings and the situation Link plc. is in at the moment, I classified the problems into three groups.

4.1.2 Production related

In Table 1 the 3 product groups and their characteristics are listed. Now I will sort out the problems which occur during the manufacturing process to be able to give improvement suggestions later on.

In the Introduction paper the MD explained that most of the operations are done on manual machines. Only some parts of the turning process are done on an automatic spindle. In today’s industrial world, especially parts like me-chanical couplings are usually produced with the help of automatic machines. The reason why the manual production of these comparatively simple products often sources a number of problems is described very often with the words “Nobody is perfect”. As the performance of this kind of production is always dependant on the workers, only companies with high satisfied employees should think about production without many automatic installations.

Figure 2: Manufacturing cycle for product C (Inspections highlighted)

A resulting problem which can easily arise in manually producing companies like Link plc is the disproportionate inclusion of inspection facilities in the Pro-duction process. In this case Inspections are carried out after every single ma-chining step which wastes heaps of working time and money.

I can’t say if 9 workers for the Quality control department is an unusual high number, but if the production was running fine, one or two quality inspection areas would be enough. Product C for example needs eight inspections (Fig-ure 2) which are definitely too many.

4.1.3 Quality related

A company with so many quality inspections included in the production process should be able to guarantee the flawlessness of their finished products. That’s what I used to think before analysing this case study.

The MD calls them the “silly little mistakes” which lead to customer dissatisfac-tion. It has been alarming that the product return rate raised from 2% to 20% comparing the beginning of the year with the last six months! Especially in the summer the complaining rate was extremely high.

Figure 3: Product complaints Link plc. (April вЂ" Sept 2006)

Especially