Synopsis

Synopsis

This case entitled “E-Cab” written by Stuart Chambers presents the scenario of E-Cab, one of the leading manufacturers of customized metal cabinets, which is facing many quality problems in its Operations department at the Lille factory, northern France, and is therefore, attempting to address those issues with the help of two young graduate production engineers-Jean Brasfort and Sara Montenay. E-Cab is a French company that is famous for its “cabs”, the highly tailored metal cabinets and for its wide range of designs and sizes. Of late, E-Cab has successfully managed to grab a huge clientele base with the

Cellular Communications Networks,

Railway companies and

Cable/Satellite Television

companies and is consequently, experiencing a rapid growth in its sales and profits. The main reasons for this exponential growth include favourable and rapid growth in the fore-mentioned industries, excellent design, technical support, value adding products and quick response capability of the company.

However, the company is facing some critical challenges in its in-house manufacturing factory such as the duplication of tasks, scrapped materials, shortages, wasted efforts, large overheads, and failed MRP systems etc, which have raised a huge question mark on the continued success of the company. These issues derive from E-cab’s failure to quality conformance. Hence, the two engineers Brasfort and Montenay were especially appointed by the management to improve the situation. What they did is they carried out extensive studies on the factory, implemented some improvement measures, and presented the key issues facing the company.

Issues

The case seems to raise two key issues. These are discussed as follows:

* The basic issue raised by this case is that the Quality in any manufacturing unit is affected by two major aspects-(1) the physical aspects of the factory like the work specifications, material handling practices, machines and equipments, etc and (2)...