A Process Gone Bad Case Study

P1D Corporation has two major products that it provides to its customers in four major cities in India . Lately, P1D has found that the customers have been returning more of their products for rework than they had in the past. Nearly 20% of the shipped product was being returned. The Vice President for Quality and Productivity visited Motorola while on a Conference visit; he was impressed by their emphasis on the Six Sigma process application and their ability to control the defects in their products using this approach. Upon his return to the Corporation and a presentation to the MD on the concept, a plan was quickly drafted and put into place. P1Ds plan entailed the establishment of a Black Belt Certification System for Six Sigma experts to be assigned to the various production teams and to implement the concept for product improvement while operating with their usual quality processes. A contract was let to Motorola to do the training and certification, members of the production teams were identified to become Black Belts, and the quality team set out to establish the process by which they would be implemented into the overall steps and quality operations. This program was also implemented with their suppliers and vendors and they had their representatives attend the program as well. Once trained, the Black Belts were instructed by the VP for Quality and Pro duction to look for the faults and problems in the production process and to work as an eradication team to wipe out the errors that they found. Each Black Belt was assigned to a different production team. The results of the effort were scattered. Some of the production teams improved their quality levels and the errors were reduced. On the other hand there were teams where quality levels were improved on error rates, but the products continued to be returned with errors in them. As a result, the VP for Quality and Production simply discharged the Black Belts on those teams, and constituted new ones. The results continued to be bad. Questions on this case: What do you think is happening that makes a program result in erratic production, when the very purpose of the process is to reduce erratic error? Do you feel that the Black Belts were trained correctly? If not, what went wrong? Who should have done something about the problem? Is there a problem with the Six Sigma Process, or is this a problem with the quality process established by P1D ?

What would you do to improve the error as you have deduced from the previous question? What kind of problems did the VP for Quality and Production create by removing the first group of Black Belts from the production process? Was his action appropriate? What should the VP have done, in your opinion? Why do you think that the production and error rates continued to be bad?