Question

2. Identify the three elements of Lean, and explain how they work together.

5. Describe three recent situations in which you were directly affected by poor product or service quality.

6. Discuss the key differences between common and assignable causes of variation. Give examples.

You may use personal or business examples while addressing these questions. Please explain your answer in great detail. Thank you!

Answer 1

Answer 2= flexible workforce, small lot sizes, and preventative maintenance are the three main elements of the lean. In order to obtain the lean process, it is important that the products take place as per the demand and in smaller lot sizes. This can be supported by the flexible workforce that is when the demand is high, more employees can be hired and when demand is low, fewer employees will be selected. At the same time, it is important to have the preventive maintenance so that no breakdown results when the production is taking place otherwise the benefits received from the variable workforce and small lot sizes will be lost

Answer 5= Situation 1= Recently I went to the restaurant and placed the order for the dinner, the order fulfillment took a lot of time. This is a clear indication that the processes of the restaurant were not well designed that resulted in a huge time gap resulting in poor service quality.

Situation 2= I bought a cell phone recently. The company claimed that it will provide the battery backup up to 3 days but when I started to use it, the cell phone hardly provided the backup for 1 day. This is a quality issue as there is a huge variation between the standards claimed by the company and the actual performance of the product

Situation 3= I ordered pizza through one of the pizza delivery companies that claimed that pizza will be delivered within 30 min but in actual I had to wait for about an hour. This is an indication of poor service.

Answer 6= Assignable cause of variations can be seen as the unnatural variations which are present n any process and these must be identified and resolved. While common cause variation is the expected variations that are present in the process and can never be resolved. Their intensity can be reduced through process improvement.