This Assignment reviews on the course materials of Units 3 and 4. Student will answer (5) questions in MS Word and or Excel Spreadsheet , submit your document into the link in Assignment area, see due date from the Course Schedule.
Question One : Quality Cost Calculation
ABC children’s toy manufacturing company implemented the Lean Six Sigma program in 2004. Following are quality-related accounting data that have been accumulated for the 5-year period 1 year prior to the program’s start.
Year 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
Quality Costs (000s)
Prevention $ 3.2 10.7 28.3 42.6 50.0
Appraisal 26.3 29.2 30.6 24.1 19.6
Internal Failure 39.1 51.3 48.4 35.9 32.1
External Failure 118.6 110.5 105.2 91.3 65.2
Accounting Measures (000s)
Sales $ 2,700.6 2,690.1 2,705.3 2,810.2 2,880.7
Manufacturing costs 420.9 423.4 424.7 436.1 435.5
a. Compute the company’s total failure costs as a percentage of total quality costs for each of the 5 years. Does there appear to be a trend to this result? If so, speculate on what might have caused the trend.
b. Compute prevention costs and appraisal costs, each as a percentage of total costs, during each of the 5 years speculate on what the company’s quality strategy appears to be.
c. Compute quality –sales indices and quality-cost indices for each of the 5 years. Is it possible to assess the effectiveness of the company’s quality-management program from these index values?
d. List several examples of each quality-related cost-that is, prevention, appraisal, and internal and external failure – that might result from the production of children toys.
Note: to learn more on quality cost categories and index calculation, visit the website http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/Hassanasif-493959-cost-of-quality/
This PPT file, slides # 17-18 show quality cost index calculation.
Question Two : Pareto Chart
During the past month, a customer-satisfaction survey was given to 200 customers at a local fast-food restaurant. The following complaints were lodged:
Complaint Number of Complaints
Cold Food 105
Flimsy utensils 20
Food tastes bad 10
Salad not fresh 94
Poor service 15
Food greasy 9
Lack of courtesy 5
Lack of cleanliness 25
Create a Pareto chart with this information, comment on what you (as a manager of this fast-food restaurant) would do about the high number of complaints on ‘cold food’ and ‘salad not fresh’. See explanation of Pareto Chart from your LSS , V 15, 16, 17.
Question Three: Problem solving using define, measure, analyze, improve, control
An orange juice producer has found that the fill weights (weight of product per container) of several of its orange juice products do not meet specifications. If the problem continues, unhappy customers will stop buying its product. Outline the steps that it should take to solve this problem. Provide as much detail as you can
Question Four : Creativity and Innovation tools
Brainstorm 10 reasons why a computer might malfunction.
Choose either question 5 or 6 below – complete the one you are most interested in.
Question Five – House of Quality
Create a house of quality for a computer. Develop customer requirements related to ease of use, cost, capabilities, and connectivity. Make sure the customer requirements are a “wish list” stated in nontechnical terms. (see example from LSS Primer, Section 3, page III-26)
Question Six - Design of Experiment.
A spectrometer was used to make five measurements of the carbon content (in ppb) of a certain silicon wafer on four consecutive days. The results are as follows:
Day 1: 358 390 380 372 366
Day 2: 373 376 413 367 368
Day 3: 336 360 370 368 352
Day 4: 368 359 351 349 343
a. Construct an ANOVA table, you can give a range for the P-value.
b. Can you conclude that the calibration of the spectrometer differs among the four days?
The handout of Design of Experiement was posted in the Unit 5/Supplement/DOE; this may help to calculate. Or you can use Excel spreadsheet, or SPSS, or Minitab to compute the ANOVA table.
