Global Green Books Publishing is growing its eBook business, satisfying demand f

Question

Global Green Books Publishing

is

growing its eBook business, satisfying demand for

customized eBooks for the college market and for a growing number of commercial customers.

These customers expect a high

-

quality product that works in each of the environments that

there users use

–

variou

s operating systems, eBook readers, and hardware (desktop

computers, tablets/phablets, and smartphones).

As part of the standard development process, each eBook goes through several quality checks.

When the order is received, a customer service representa

tive checks the order and a more

senior customer service representative verifies the order. During

the Production Phase,

a

quality

assistant will check the eBook against the job order and customer order to make sure it is ready

for production, and once app

roved by quality, each of the requested eBook formats are created.

A second quality check

is performed by the customer service representative who is assigned to

the customer to make

sure that each requested format is ready to release to the

customer

.

Some

customers (and their eBook users) are complaining about quality problems in the eBooks

they have received from Global Green Books. Sometimes the eBooks do not work correctly in

the intended environment. Sometimes, content is not clear or fuzzy. Sometimes,

a quality check

will find that not all parts of the requested order have been included in the eBook. This causes

rework before the eBook can come back for a second quality check before being released to the

customer service representative for the final qu

ality check.

In each of these cases, the

"cost of

quality"

is

the cost of NOT creating a quality product.

Every time the project has to rework an

eBook to correct a quality defect,

the cost of quality increases.

Samantha and her project managers met with

a key group of supervisors who are managing a

critical number of the eBook projects. They reviewed the lessons learned data and brainstormed

from their experiences with producing eBooks to identify some of the quality problems that they

were seeing in the

eBook projects. They identified a number of issues:

?

The customer’s q

uality requirements are never discussed

within the project team. They

are dealt with by the customer service representatives at the beginning and end of the

eBook production process. This means that team members

do not know what the

customer expects and just do the tasks assigned without knowi

ng what is “good”. They

may have a very different or no understanding of what the customer’s quality needs are,

unlike the customer service representatives.

?

The standard job template doesn’t suggest that supervisors

plan into the

ir

project

any

reviews

or

checkpoints at which quality can be verified

. The only quality checks come

after the eBook is finished.

This does quality checks of the whole eBook, but doesn’t

allow for checks on each component

–

content formats, correct conversions or desk top

publishing

checks.

?

These two factors lead to a perception among team members that q

uality is

just

simply

some testing by some other groups (quality and customer service),

rather than a

way

of

working

and reviewing or checking work as they proceed. Further, many team

members

don’t

even

see quality as their responsibility, because it’s something done by someone

else

.

?

One of the challenges facing the customer service representatives is that they do test

each eBook, but they cannot always

check

each eBook

in an

environme

nt that is

the

same as that used by the end users of the eBook. Sometimes users have different

equipment than the customer service representatives have to use for their testing. There

are times when this causes surprises after the eBook is released.

This

leads to external

failure costs

for dealing with p

rocessing customer complaints

, dealing with rework to fix

the eBooks, and releasing a revised eBook. Luckily the customers handle distribution to

their users, so Global Green Books is not bearing the cost

of customer returns and

warranty claims that they might have if they were selling a consumer product directly to

consumers.

The group agrees that they would like to make some changes to bring their total quality costs

below the costs of quality that they a

re currently incurring. This means that they want to reduce

the costs of failing to meet customer requirements or expectations, and reinvest those savings

into preventing problems as they go that do not meet the customer’s requirements, and

checking to ma

ke sure that the eBook and all of its components conform to the customer’s

requirements.

Catching some of the quality problems sooner, before the entire eBook is

produced will also reduce the internal failure costs that they are experiencing. These intern

al

failure costs are rework and re

-

checking following the quality checks by Quality and the

customer service representative.

Comment on the following aspects of the case study:

a)

Consider the problems that Samantha and the group identified. What do you think are

the causes of these problems?

b)

What would you suggest they do differently to eliminate these problems?

c)

Who should be responsible for quality? What would you recommend be

the specific

responsibilities of each identified role?

d)

What

prevention

activities

would you suggest

to prevent poor quality in

the eBook

products

?

Examples could be planning for quality activities or team building activities

focused on improving quality

e)

What appraisal activities would you suggest to

evaluat

e the eBook product to ensure

that it meets

quality standards and

customer requirements? Should they add in

-

process

checks of eBook components in addition to their current

final inspection/test

s? If s

o,

who should do these?

f)

What would you suggest they do to involve team members more in pursuit of high quality

eBooks for their customers?

Explanation / Answer

solution-

a. Major cause of this problem is that there is lack of knowledge of quality management among people of Global Green Book.Another cause would be lack of coordination and information sharing amoung various teams.

b. In order to eliminate these problem,Global green book people should understand quality requirement of customer by deep dive discussion with customer.

c. Quality team is responsible for quality.Quality team should check ebooks and understand that e book caters to all requirement of customer.

d. Preventive activities to prevent poor quality would be

1. Proper information flow among team member for quality requirement of customer.

2. Strenghtening quality team for better checks and measures.

e. Appraisal for team should be linked with no. of cases of rework. Persons would be rated higher if no. of cases of rework is minimum.

f. Global green book should incentivised its team in case no. of cases of rework is less. Lower no. of cases of rework , higher would be incentive. Company should also conduct worshop in order to educate its employee for quality management.

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