Director – Quality Assurance
The quality culture within the company must be addressed at a Senior Leadership level to improve overall performance, profits, and change.
The current company culture is production driven focusing on market share and supported by the other departments. In the Greasex production line, there are multiply issues as operators are not well trained, ignoring quality procedures, and managers failing to document and hold individuals accountable. The filling equipment has no preventive maintenance with 12 open work orders. It is offline frequently at 15%, requires expensive custom parts, causing the line to be inefficient at 50% of standard. These actions are being reinforced by the productivity culture.
The GM has given full support for quality improvement and Director buy-in is imperative. A meeting with the Directors and GM to establish quality’s renewed importance and address the issues are a must. Their point of view is to maximize production and market share. Buy-in can be had through the win-win solution of replacing the filling machine, adding additional training and a quality process. This will speed production and increase the number of products created while reducing risk and defects. Accountability and documentation will quantify impacts as well as enforce quality standards.
An alternative and less favorable solution is affecting change through the Quality Assurance team alone. This can be a slow process to change the productivity culture and cause conflict with the other departments. It would also not include the positive effects on production, training, and risk reduction.
Base on the assumptions that quality problems go unaddressed, the consequence is the company will continue to lose money and market share. Therefore, it is recommended that change be made at a Senior Leadership level to address cultural issues while improving