Process Control at Polaroid

Memorandum

To: Bud Rolf

Date: Feb. 13th, 2012

Subject: Implementation/Improving Project Greenlight for Polaroid

The overarching problem at Polaroid is the issues with quality of their products. The percentage of defective rates reported by the central process auditors has increased from around 1% to 10%, which signifies that there are still more changes to be made in order to improve the quality management. Furthermore, the poor quality of the product causes more findings of defects that ultimately lead to higher costs.

Employee Mindset: One of the requirements of the Project Greenlight was standardizing procedures and under this new concept, maintenance personnel felt that their tasks were being depersonalized. As well, the operators had a difficult time switching their mindset to the new concept as they continued to tweak the machines based on their own experience instead of consistently recording the results. There was also an issue of trust between the machine operators and quality control personnel. First, machine operators believed that they themselves would act responsibly and did not trust their neighbors. Similarly, quality control personnel did not trust the operators as they thought some operators deliberately avoided rejecting production. Also, most process engineering technicians felt they were better trained to do the sampling and process control tasks now being transferred to the operators.

Poor Procedures: There are problems with the methods of sample testing conducted by the Quality Control Department (QC). For example, QC only used “perfect” cameras to test film but many consumers’ cameras did not function precisely to specification. Thus quality control could easily miss problems related to the interaction of the film with imperfect cameras. Furthermore, the process of reporting quality is inefficient and inaccurate. Unnecessary sample testing is being done on sampled cartridges and...