Posted: June 17th, 2015
The Dandeo Door Corporation (DDC) manufactures steel and aluminum exterior doors for commercial and residential applications. DDC landed a major contract as supplier to Berney Homes, a builder of residential communities in several major cities throughout the southwestern United States. Because of the large volume of demand, DDC expanded its manufacturing operations to three shifts and hired additional workers.
Not long after DDC began shipping windows to Berney homes, it received some complaints about excessive gaps between the door and frame. This was somewhat alarming to DDC, because its reputation as a high quality manufacturer was the principle reason that it was selected as a supplier to Berney homes. DDC placed a great deal of confidence in its manufacturing capability because of its well trained and dedicated employees, and it never felt the need to consider formal process control approaches. In view of the recent complaint, however, Jeremy Dandeo, The company president, suspected that the expansion to a three-shift operation, the pressures to produce higher volumes, and the push to meet just in time delivery requests were causing a breakdown in quality.
On the recommendation of the plant manager, Jeremy hired a quality consultant to train the shift supervisors and selected line workers in statistical process control methods. As a trial project, the plant manager wants to evaluate the capability of critical cutting operation that he suspects might be the source of the gap problem. The target specification for this cutting operation is 30.000 inches with a tolerance of 0.125inch. Thus, the upper and lower specifications are LSL= 29.875 inches and USL= 30.125 inches. The consultant suggested inspecting five consecutive door panels in the middle of each shift over a 10 day period and recording the dimension of the cut. Exhibit 16.12 shows 10 days’ data collected for each shift, by operator.
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