Case Study - Hank Kolb

Q1. Overview of current situation

In the case study, Hank kolb, director of quality assurance, had encountered some quality problems that had occurred in the company. There has been a lack of product quality control in the management of all departments, i.e. from the working attitude of individual employees, the production line and the market division. Currently, Hank’s company is producing a specialized degreasing solvent packed in a spray can for the usage in high-technology sector called Greasex. Hank had feedback from his subordinate that all the spray cans in a total of eight cartons was found to have a little high pressure which deviated from the design specification, and these faulty product was totally ignored by the production supervisor who, instead of sending them for reworking, had “resolved” the problem by manually turning these spray cans, vented them and thereafter pushed to the market. The reason given by the supervisor was to fulfill the production plan, which could be a delay if to send these rejected spray cans to the rework for rectification.

Hank Kolb also noticed that unqualified operator, transferred from other department, is being designated to handle the filling process. And on top of that, the automated filling machine was wrongly utilized as it was not designed for the function of filling. It was switch over by the plant maintenance to handle the lower viscosity of greasex, which constitute to a non-standard downtime of 15% of the actual running time due to the replacement of specialized filling head in six months. And through the feedbacks gathered from the purchasing department, Hank had realized the low quality of plastic nozzles is being fitted to the spray cans, which leads to the slight burr on the inside rim. And had cause an increase in the application pressure at the filling head by the maintenance adjustment in order to resolve troubleshoot this problem.

Next, Hank also had queries on the re-design on the contouring of the...