Fire

Cranston Nissan Case study

Answer the following questions from the perspective of TQM

1) Categorize the quality problems in this case.

Quality is defined as the reliability, durability, serviceability and dependability of products and services and also as fitness for use. Steve Jackson’s body shop did not display any of these characteristics, but instead showed the opposite. It did not have an upper or lower control limit set otherwise it would realize that quality was below their control limit and they would strive to improve quality. Its objective should have bee to repair the rust damage in an efficient and effective manner, but it instead created more problems and demonstrated poor quality. This is a problem with efficiency because instead of fixing one problem, the created more which they had to fix over a long period of time. There was also the problem of inventory being out of stock. The repair shop should have used the economic order quantity to ensure they are always in stock when the customer needs a part instead of waiting 3 days to order the part.

2) What are the probable causes of so many mishaps?

This is a cause of not implementing Total Quality Management. From the perspective of Total Quality Management, the quality problems can be broken down into five key elements: Objective, Design, Capabilities, Infrastructure and Metrics. These are all elements of the continuous process improvement, also known as the kaizen. The Objective of the body shop was one problem because the customer had gone in to get repair for rust damage, but instead, was presented with more problems than he had started out with. This is also due to a failure in the Design. If there were a specific Design to execute a rust damage repair process, then this would reduce the problems cause in other areas of the car. A design is meant to increase the objective while minimizing the number of steps, the complexity and the time. The Capabilities of the design was a problem because...