Question

Read the case study below and answer the questions accordingly.
An elevator manufacturing company
Miss Frans, the general Manager of a company manufacturing elevators, was frustrated with the lack of co
operation between the mechanical engineers, who designed new elevators, and the manufacturing
engineers, who determined how to make the elevators. The mechanical engineers would often design an
elevator without consulting the manufacturing engineers and expect the factory to figure out how to build
it. The products were difficult or nearly impossible to build, and their quality and cost suffered tremendously.

Designs frequently moved between the engineers in order to improve manufacturability. Customers suffered
as a result because they have to wait for long periods of time.
Miss Frans believed that if these managers communicated effectively during design, most of the problems
would be resolved. At her wits’ end, she found a large empty room and moved these engineers into it. A
month later, to her surprise, both group engineers learnt to co-operate by building a wall of bookcases between them.

What would you do in this case to resolve such a scenario?     
Students can discuss concepts such as but not limited to: -

The importance of the customer in product and service design,     

- What happened to the teams when effective communication is omitted?                                   

- Product development team , etc.      

Answer 1

Hey!

1. Working in separate functional departments isolated them from social interaction of different groups and creates a virtual competition with each other. This increases the feeling of superiority and prefer try to stay confined to the roles they can perform in the best manner.

2. Principles of TQM that have been violated here are as follows:

a. Focus on customers: Due to internal differences in teams, the focus on customer has been lost and results in long wait time for delivery of products.

b. Orientation of business process: The design and manufacturing department lack the process which can facilitate to conduct business smoothly.

c. Team Empowerment: The internal conflict between the departments has resulted in poor production and service. Refusal to work together is quite prominent between the teams which is a straight violation.

d. Leadership and strategic planning: The plan made by the GM is not guided to the team and instead he is relying on the groups to take care the problem.

3. It is important the teams interact with each other not only during the work but also outside workplace to encourage better communication and hence resulting in better quality of designs. GM should reorganize the teams based on the process which can take benefit from these activities. The GM should interact with these departments and collect information about necessary details related to the process. This will help in identifying the reasons of delays and conduct meeting with the lead engineers to highlight the same. This will also help the key stakeholders to stay updated with the progress on the business process. Further once the practice is adopted the different departments can work in coherence by conducting these meetings and resulting in better communication. The problems that might come during the implementation of the above suggestions might be related to differences in personal behavior. In case the lead engineers have old history, then even the meetings will not be able to conduct in smooth manner. Also, if the problem exist beyond the scope of the two teams then larger bigger arrangement will have to be done in order to address the bigger concern.

4. Zero defect implies to get free from all kind of problems and all products conform to the pre decided specifications. It helps in reducing the cost of failure and results in expected scenarios for the customers.

Hope it helps

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