Case Study: Quality Parts Company

1. Which of the changes being considered by the manager of Quality Parts Company are counter to the lean philosophy of the company?

Lean production is a philosophy and a way of working involving eliminating all forms of waste (where waste is defined as anything that does not add value in the production process and supply chain). Many changes being considered by the manager are counter to lean philosophy. These are: Installing an automated ordering system to help control inventories and to “keep the skids fined” implies the use of inventory as a motivator to push production; adding external inspectors; setting up a network line only institutionalizes the acceptance of rework.

They could have implemented a strict quality control to ensure the quality of the products being produced by the company.

Factory workers should become their own inspectors that would personally be responsible for the quality of their output. In this way, QPC can save more money and more time. Also, utilizing the labor and the machine does not coincide with lean philosophy.

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The focus should be more on flexibility and reducing the waste of overproduction. The installation of high rise shelving indicates an acceptance of wasteful inventory. This would just be added as a non-value step in their process. Lean philosophy leaves no room for surplus or safety stock. No safety stocks are allowed this philosophy says that, ‘If you cannot use it now, you do not need to produce it now.” Once production is done in excess, this can be considered as waste.

2. Make recommendations for the lean improvements in such areas as scheduling, layout, kanban, task groupings, and inventory. Use quantitative data as much as possible: state necessary assumptions.

As we can see in the process, step 1 has one of the highest operation time and second to the highest when it comes to set up time. Therefore, adding a machine here will help improve the production of the company. The bottleneck of the process is in step 4 which includes three steps in assembling the product. With this, products were clogged to machine department before reaching the assembly bench.