total quality management

The Federal Screw Company manufactures a wide variety of screws for industrial companies to designs usually supplied by customers. Total manufacturing payroll is 260 people with sales of about $4,000,000. Operations are relatively simple but geared to high-volume production. Wire in rolls is fed to heading machines at high speed, where the contour of the screw is formed. Pointers and slotters perform secondary operations. The thread-rolling operation completes the screw configuration. Heat treatment, plating, and sometimes baking are the final steps and are performed by an outside contractor located nearby.

You have been asked to prepare a quality cost summary for the company and have made the following notes:

1. The Quality Control Department is primarily a Final Inspection Department (eight inspectors), who also inspect the incoming wire. Another inspector performs patrol inspection in the Heading Room, checking first and last pieces. The Quality Control Department also handles the checking and setting of all ring, snap, and plug gages used by themselves and production personnel. Salaries of inspectors are approximately $12,000 per year.

2. Quality during manufacture is the responsibility of the operator-setup teams assigned to batteries of about four machines. It is difficult to estimate how much of their time is spent checking setups or checking the running of the machines, so you have not tried to do this as yet. Production has two sorting inspectors, earning $9,000 each, who sort lots rejected by Final Inspection.

3. The Engineering Department prepares quotations, designs tools, plans the routing of jobs, and establishes the quality requirements, working from customers’ prints. They also do the trouble-shooting to investigate the cause(s) of the defective units, at a cost of about $10,000 a year. Another $8,000 is spent in previewing customers’ prints to identify critical dimensions, trying to get such items changed by the customer, and interpreting customers’ quality requirements into specifications for use by Federated inspectors and manufacturing personnel.

4. Records of scrap, rework, and customer returns are meager, but you have been able to piece together a certain amount of information from records and estimates.

a. Scrap from Final Inspection rejections and customer returns amounted to 438,000 and 667,000 pieces, respectively, for the last 2 months.

b. Customer returns requiring rework average about 1,000,000 pieces per month.

c. Scrap generated during production is believed to be about half the total floor scrap (the rest not being quality-related) of 30,000 lbs per month.

d. Final Inspection rejects an average of 400,000 reworkable pieces per month. These are items that can be flat-rolled or rerolled.

5. Rough cost figures have been obtained from the accountants, who say that scrap items can be figured at $6.00 per thousand pieces, floor scrap (i.e., production scrap) at $400 per thousand pounds, reworking of customer returns at $2.00 per thousand pieces, and flat-rolling or rerolling at $0.60 per thousand pieces. All these figures are supposed to include factory overhead.

Prepare a quality cost summary on an annual basis (i.e., put the expenses in proper quality cost categories: Prevention Costs, Appraisal Costs, Internal Costs and External Failure Costs).

Also, by looking at the total in each quality cost category, briefly discuss what the company should do next.

Matematikk Matlab and Mathematica Statistisk analyse Statistikk

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