Introduction and background Dow Chemical Company is the world largest chemical company that uses the power of science and technology to innovate what is essential to human development (The Dow Chemical Company, 2015). Herbert Henry Dow founded the Dow Chemical Company in 1897 through the introduction of new chlorine cell to make bleach as its original product, which contributed to the success of the company today (American Chemical Society, 2015). There are a few types of market and solutions that Dow Chemical Company provides such as agriculture, automotive and building & construction. An example of the solution for building and construction is the GREAT STUFF™ Insulating Foam Sealants that helps to save energy and money by preventing air leaks through gaps such as windows and doors (The Dow Chemical Company, 2015). Although there are numerous solutions that Dow Chemical Company has provided, there are still issues that arise such as: 1) lack of product storage and loading infrastructure due to the increasing demand of consumers in product, 2) increased rate of motor vehicle accident 3) ineffectiveness of project planning and organization. The recommendation to improve the issues are practicing Just-In-Time (JIT), implementing rules and regulation, and implementing employee empowerment.

Problem description and analysis Dow Chemical Company had encountered an issue, the lack of product storage and loading infrastructure to meet the rise of consumers demand in product line where the plant production had to produce large amount of products (Buss and Ivey, 2001). The product storage and loading infrastructure will have to be enlarged at the manufacturing site but there are no excess spaces as the site was packed with railcars (Buss and Ivey, 2011). Enlarging the product storage and loading infrastructure will result in traffic congestion and lead to delay of the process of loading and shipping. The delaying process will cause dissatisfaction and loss of customers. Chances that customers will cancel their purchase if the products are not delivered on time. Those undelivered products will be either kept in the inventory or threw away as they do not generate any profit and occupied the storage area. Moreover, enlarging the product storage and loading infrastructure cost $3.2MM. Instead of using the original plan, Six Sigma Rail Delivery Project was a better method because it requires capital investment of $0.75MM rather than $3.2MM and manage the increase of demand while enhancing the performance to consumers (Buss and Ivey, 2001). Besides that, the increase rate of motor vehicle accident was another issue of Dow Chemical Company. This was due to lack of awareness about the safety of the workers in Dow Chemical Company. For example, 25 workers from sales and marketing whom drive to customer’s sites and around the Hydrocarbons and Energy facilities suffered from motor vehicle accident and the profitability of Dow Chemical Company was affected where the workers were not able to work due to injury (United States Department of Labor, 2005). Based on the survey done on the drivers, the three main causes of the accidents were not paying attention on driving, not realizing the surroundings’ object and not checking when reversing the car (United States Department of Labor, 2005). The reason of the three causes of the accidents might be due to lack of sleep, distraction such as mobile phones, driving behavior and laziness. All of these behaviors probably derived from the slack rules and regulations of Dow Chemical Company. Furthermore, the accidents happened when the workers of Dow Chemical Company are not familiar with the customer’s site. The customer’s sites may not have a proper road sign such as danger sign or two service road sign that could lead to serious accidents. Thus, Dow Chemical Company was motivated to implement a program to address this issue using Six Sigma to reduce 50% of the motor vehicle accidents and to find out the accurate causes of this issue while using the least cost (United States Department of Labor, 2005). In addition, the ineffectiveness of project planning and organization in Dow Chemical Company was caused by the poor communication between the different departments (Mindjet, n.d.). Each department uses different tools in the project planning and organization such as Vision and PowerPoint and this resulted each department to have different software program (Mindjet, n.d.). Using different software program will seemed to be lack of teamwork and interaction between the departments in Dow Chemical Company. This will give an impression to customers that Dow Chemical Company are not practicing with professionalism and might drive potential customers away. This will occurred when Dow Chemical Company are presenting a business proposal to customers which involve the participation of different departments. If the workers are not familiar with the different tools used by each department, problem such as software not able to support the tools will arise. The flow of presentation will be disrupted and not fluent. The lack of understanding between the functions of other departments will not be able to convey clear message to customers. Master Black Belt and technology leader Chris Haney suggested to use a mutual tool to conduct meeting through Internet broadcast and in-person (Mindjet, n.d.). Thus, Chris Haney was motivated to use Mindjet Platform, the basic part of Six Sigma that is user-friendly while fully utilizing the time to overcome this issue and increase productivity (Mindjet, n.d.)

Evaluation of strategies

Lack of product storage and loading infrastructure

To cope with the predicted increase in demand of customers, Dow Chemical have to design a new rail delivery system for one of the manufacturing plant in their site. The company had identified one solution for the problem after the whole project was done and all of the elements in checklist and functions had been defined. Dow’s strategy will be Double Pulls which the manufacturer deployed the additional rail switching to increase the quantity of daily throughput of loading rack. The railcars will be fully filled by the products and became additional storage for the products. When there is no order from customers, the product would be transferred to particular location for storage purpose. When customer order is received, the railcar which previously loaded by the product will straightly release and send to the doorstep of customers. The advantages of using Double-pull strategy would be the strategy doesn’t required additional storage tank which can save capital cost. Double-pull became more flexible when adding more handling step as it can quickly be routed to a customer order and fulfill their needs as fast as possible. Below will be the TQM tool that will be used in this strategy: Check sheet. It enables Dow Chemical to display the period of railcar to fill the products day by day in more effective way.

Equipment | Shift | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Railcar A | Morning | / | // | // | | | | Night | // | / | | // | //// | Railcar B | Morning | / | | // | | / | | Night | | // | / | // | |

Increased rate of motor vehicle accident To reach the goal of safety and health, Dow had fully used the DMAIC approach to reduce the motor vehicle accident problem.
Step 1: Measure A project team has been established by Dow Chemical for the initial goal of reducing accident rate by 20% over a year and reach 50% for the following years. The team began to collect data on the variables that caused motor accident.

Step 2: Analyze
After an extensive research, the team had categorized three possible risk factors that caused accidents: environment, methods and people. One TQM tool has been used (cause and effect diagram) to support this research. The cause and effect diagram can clearly state out all the small factors that categorized under 3 main factors that together lead to the occurrence of motor vehicle accidents. (Next page to see the diagram)

Step 3: Improve After the risk factors clearly shown in cause and effect diagram, the team constructed a series of standard procedure to deal with the risk factors. Furthermore, to make sure that whole worker clearly knew about the risks factors that caused accidents, the team published the finding of the Six Sigma project into their web-based newsletter (United States Department of Labor, 2005).

Step 4: Control This will be the final phrase for DMAIC approach as Dow need to ensure that the project need to be controlled all the time so that to continue develop further for improvements. Specific presentation and new criteria for investigation of motor accident had been held for developing suitable measures and worker education program.

Result: There is a 30 % reduction of accident occurred in 2003 and 2004. Dow was able to reach their line goal in 2005 as they successfully reduced the accident rate for 50%. Six sigma project has succeed after Dow adopted it by forming a project team to investigate on this issue.

Ineffectiveness project planning and organization

Here are some of the strategies which can solve the problem stated in the previous question. Other tools are inefficient at this moment but Mindjet offer a much better product to use which also in turns to train employees. By having Mindjet connecting with the employees, it is important to have link with the six sigma curriculum. Dow chemical company created a better space to think of creative ideas and share information.(Mindjet, n.d.). Thus, the platform combines into the six sigma methodology, allowing employees to generate and share ideas. Given the needs to enhance better in the future business world, Dow’s employees will need an easy platform to use which makes partnership without proximity. (Mindjet, n.d.). It is all under one roof, with the dialogue mapping method means it tracks the meeting content. (Mindjet, n.d.). To further explain, the participant input is in the reality, so that the details of the participants account are check at the end of the conclusion of a meeting. (Mindjet, n.d.). It also have other functions such as, summarizes topics covered and how does it relate with the central meeting theme and its specific task owners. (Mindjet, n.d.). With the six sigma training, more employees will be using the Mindjet platform because it is easy to use and its effectiveness of it. This makes more employees to obtain the license to use the platform. Below is the scatterplot diagram, this is the result after applying the six sigma. The higher the level of clarity in communication, the more effective the project planning and organization.
Effectiveness of project planning and organization
Effectiveness of project planning and organization
Level of clarity in communication
Level of clarity in communication

Recommendations for improvement

Lack of product storage and loading infrastructure

Our recommendation is to practice the just in time manufacturing (JIT), where Dow Chemical company will only produce the product when the customer place an order and complete the payment. However, the company also have to analyse, record down the quantity and what type of raw material of the product that customers commonly requested is in the inventory, update the quantity of everything they have in the inventory and how much time for the raw material to delivered to the company to continue with the manufacture to avoid any shortage or surplus, inefficiency and waste of time. For example, where a customer order 10 thousand units for that particular product and the Dow Chemical have estimated the time needed to deliver the raw material to the company for producing is about 2days time. Therefore, Dow Chemical Company have to keep a minimum of 2 days raw material for the production so they can manufacture while waiting for the raw material to delivered and continue manufacturing without wasting anytime. By practicing this, it allows the company to save a lot of inventory space as the raw material for production is not needed until the customers demand for it which leads to lower cost for inventory and more storage for others product. Wilson (2013), mentioned that, Toyota is one of the company being considered by many to be the poster child for JIT success. The Toyota Company kept a small amounts of raw material at each node in production, so that production can take place for any production

Increased rate of motor vehicle accident

Our recommendation for the Dow Chemical company would be coming up with a rules and regulation for the employees to follow especially the, sales person, who need to travel to meet the customers. Example of things listed in the regulation is get enough of sleep on the day before travel for a distance to meet the customers and use Bluetooth or earphones when answering the calls. As for the behaviour and the laziness of the employees might due to the lack of motivation. “Most people are motivated more by the work they do and the environment in which they work than by the money they earn.” (Kauffman , n.d). Therefore the company have to provide a compensation as in both direct and indirect financial for the employees. Direct financial as in pay for the petrol used when travelled to meet the customers or medical fees when accident involve during the work, whereas indirect financial such as flexible working day as long as the employees meet the sales target. Besides that, Anthony (n.d) also mentioned that it is the employers responsible for the actions of their employees while still acting within the scope of their employment. When the employees knew that the employer cares about them, eventually, they will be motivated and the behaviour will change will leads to the decrease of motor vehicle accident.

Ineffectiveness project planning and organization

Our suggestion for solving this issue is that Dow Chemical Company need to implement employee empowerment into their large group of employees. Employee empowerment basically works when the business firm allows their employees have their opinion or power during the decision making process and the manager considers their decision as one of the assets for the organization. Hence, a new communication network need to be established which include employee into it. All employees are welcomed to take part themselves into project planning of organization. Besides, Dow need to begin with an intensive training to develop an open and supportive supervisors. Training in knowledge and skills are important for supervisors or manager to take the additional responsibilities on employees (ASQ,org , n.d). It will enable the firm to build up a high-morale organization when those skilled supervisors can successfully motivated their groups of employees to work well with them during working hour. “The Empowered Employee” will definitely bring a lot of benefits for the organization. Once they can make decision without the supervision of the managers, they are able to do what they see fit if they think that it is a right matter to do during their works (Richards, n.d).

Conclusion