Ecab

Stuart Chambers, in his case “E-Cab” has highlighted the importance of material management and quality control through an analysis conducted by Pierre Dumas along with Sara Montenay and Jean Brasfort, two young graduate production engineers who had joined the firm earlier as trainees were in his team, the new VP of Operations at E-Cab’s Lille factory. E-Cab’s Lille factory is a leading European manufacturer of customized metal cabinets of various sizes and design. E-Cab was experiencing rapid growth since the last four years for three main reasons. First, the market had grown rapidly during that period in Europe because of development of cellular communication networks, rebuilding of Eastern Europe's infrastructures and huge growth in cable/ satellite television systems. Similar growth was starting in South America and South East Asia. Since E-Cab was able to cope with rapid increase in volume, it was highly valued by its customers. Second, E-Cab provided excellent technical support, designing increasingly sophisticated products which exactly met the customers' technical and aesthetic requirements in time. Finally, E-Cab was willing and had been making constant efforts to add value on their products.

However, its CEO Philippe Legrand thinks that as prices start to decrease their customers will start to pay more attention to detail, schedule, adherence and the quality of the products. Hence it was imperative that the company improve its quality of operations and at the same time keep costs under control.

Importance of quality in the face of growth:

As the market was heading towards maturity and the competition getting stiff, it was high time for E-Cab to raise productivity and improve the quality if it was to survive, meet the demand and prosper. Being titled as a leading company, E-Cab was under great pressure to get hold of this tag. E-Cab's manufacturing department really needed to improve among others to raise productivity and quality. It was really in mess...