Hank Kolb Case

HANK KOLB

QUALITY ASSURANCE CASE

Executive Summary

‘Hank Kolb, Director, Quality Assurance’ case touches on numerous quality problems in the plant. The main problem is the lack of commitment to pursue total quality management. Senior management underestimates quality and safety issues in production process and gives less priority than marketing, purchasing and delivery operations. Employees from all departments and levels are always extremely tolerant to quality issues and see it as an obstacle since their number one priority is running the business without any delay or stop-over. Absence of standard operating procedures, no prequalification process for employees but on the job training, focusing on short term but not to fix problems are the main reasons why there are many quality problems occur in the plant. It can be expected that poor attitude about quality sooner or later will be end up with fatal accident in the plant or high costs such as returned lots of products or customer losses due to dissatisfaction that makes impossible to compete with other firms doing same business.

Although hiring Hank Kolb to Quality Assurance Director position can be seen as right action because his in-depth experience about total quality management, there is still lack of commitment at senior management level. This implies that impact of Hank Kolb at quality issues may be limited. The reason is simple: Total quality management should be everyone’s business and should be perceived as equally important at all levels both management and manufacturing.

Solution Criteria and Evaluation of Alternatives:

There are certain criteria causing the company to face problems related to the lack of quality in the manufacturing process. General Manager Morgenthal is concerned about the “lack of quality attitude” within the company because he cannot prove that this attitude is costly. Assuming that what Morgenthal says is true, one of the most important solutions to the problems company...