THE FERSTAHL CASE You are quality manager for FERSTAHL, a commercial foundry. Th
ID: 2924224 • Letter: T
Question
THE FERSTAHL CASE
You are quality manager for FERSTAHL, a commercial foundry. The
Company makes castings to customer order. The product is mostly
Sand castings. FERSTAHL has the usual departmental setup for
Production: pattern shop, core room, molding, and cleaning. You
Are responsible for materials control, process survilllance, final inspection, and the test laboratory.
Recently, the sales manager returned from a field trip. He reported the loss of two customers, one an importnant account, due to poor quality – porous and hard castings. When this was discussed in the general managers office, Both you and the plant manager had some explaining to do.
One of the questions which came up was that of the quality
Attitude of the work force and supervisors. This produced
Divergent views among the managers:
The plant manager: The workers couldn’t care less. We have
Had to be strict on issuing warnings and applying penalties.
The personnel manager: I get a lot of feedback that we don’t
Maintain our tools , processes, and instruments. The workers say they have quit telling their supervisors aout these problems because nothing is done about them.
The purchasing agent: Someone came in here last month trying
To sell a poster service for stimulating people to do a better quality job. The salesperson claimed that the companies have gotten wonderful results by using the service.
The marketing manager: These fellows should be made to
Realize that, if we can’t sell the product, they won’t have jobs.
Why don’t we show them the customers’ rejects or the customers’
Letters saying we have lost the account, along with telling them
How many people will be out of a job because of poor quality ?
The controller: You pay less money when people produce less.
Why not pay less money when their quality is poor? If incentives
Work for quantity, they should work for quantity.
The engineering manager: We need to error proof the process so that
The human error doesn’t enter into it. If we had the apropriation
We could provide automatic control for many steps that are now upto
Human judgement and mistake.
The general manager turned to you: “ We don’t seem to be getting
Anywhere. You are supposed to be expert on quality. All you have said is that
The problem is much deeper than we realize and that there is no quick solution.
I would go for slow solution if it sounded convincing. Supoose you work up a personal
A month from now.”
Problem : What do you plan to do ?
(( I NEED TWO PAGES TYPED ))
THANKS
Explanation / Answer
Hearing to the views of the various managers, it is clear that the problem does not reside to one field. Every field has little issues and these little issues is getting summed up to cause a great variation in the product quality. As a quality manager I would like to take following steps to control the output quality of the product:
1. Firstly I will strengthen our inspection department and the test laboratory so that better samplings and strict quality inspection can be carried out. If the required quality is not met, the output should be sent back for reprocessing.
2. The defected products must be tested thoroughly to find out the reason behind the defect and to find the concerned department.
3. A meeting of the department concerned should be called out and discuss the test results. The problem behind the defects should be sorted out and proper and strict action should be taken to short out the defects.
4. This process should be carried out regularly and the product quality will increase gradually.
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