Bangalore Garments Exports Limited (BGEL) is a garments manufacturer in Bangalore primarily engaged in the manufacture of gents shifts against specific client orders. The garment sector is a competitive one and competing merely on price is an unsustainable strategy in the long run. The company has been in operation for the last 12 years and had earned a reputation for their delivery reliability and cost. However, they have not been able to establish a robust quality system. While they take care of the customer requirements through stringent inspection standards, they end up with a much higher proportion of rejects (seconds) than the industry average in the process. BGEL has made some initiative in the recent past to address the issue of quality.

Operating Unit:

BGEL has both manual and mechanized operations for shirt-making. The current capacity is for a daily production of 6500 shirts.While cutting and basic stitching are done using high-speed machines, there are portions of shirt-making that involves skilled labour in addition to the machines. In all, there are 65 machines and of there are 12 cutting machines, the rest being stitching machines. BGEL employs over 400 people; of these, 290 are engaged in production. The production workers are functionally organized into four sections; laying and cutting of cloth, body stitching, making slacks and attaching it to the body of the shirt, and finally, attaching the collar to the shirt. After this, it goes to the QC department for final checking and QC clearance. After the QC clearance, it is sent for packaging and dispatch. The production flows in this sequence, and each section employs a number of production workers in order to meet the daily demand.

There are separate sections for routine, preventive, and breakdown maintenance of the machines, quality control; and production planning. All these sections, as well as the production sections, have supervisors who are responsible for output and performance of the units. At the beginning of each shift, the production supervisor in the section assigns jobs to each worker based on the daily requirements. The production workers receive incentive pay on a piece rate basis, once they exceed the normal production in a shift.

Quality Management Issues:

Once of the major problems at BGEL has been the high proportion of rejection of the final product. Last year, the QC section initiated a system of recording daily rejects using a display board. The display board also recorded some significant events pertaining to the day along with the rejects data to help the management take corrective actions. The snapshot of the data on daily rejects for a period of ten days is given table 12.6.

Management Actions on Quality Management:

The display board was primarily meant to highlight to the management the quality issues at BGEL. Every day, the management reviews the status of the board and instructs the supervisors on the nature of the actions to be taken to bring down the number of rejects. The supervisors in turn modify the work practices and/or the instructions to the worker working under them and monitor compliance of the requirements. The management also engaged an expert in textile technology to educate the supervisors on modern methods in textile manufacturing and the trends in usage of new machinery. On the other hand, the maintenance workers were sent to one-week training programmes on better expert on quality assurance so that better methods would be put in place to improve the quality. The display board was one of the suggestions of the expert to improve quality.

According to the QC section, the skill levels of the employees and absence of a quality monitoring system are the two major reasons for poor quality. The other issues are high levels of absenteeism and a high turnover of the production workers.

Despite several efforts by the management in the past year, there has not been much improvement in the quality standards at BGEL. This is a major cause of concern for the MD of BGEL.

Table 12.6 A Snapshot of the Display Board at BGEL

	Daily Production	Daily Rejects	Remarks on Significant Events
Day 1	5957	298	Stoppage of machines, shortage of material to work on, high absenteeism.
Day	6043	423	Schedule and specification changes not properly communicated skill inadequacies.
Day 3	5450	600	Machine failure, work reassignment to handle high absenteeism.
Day 4	5878	353	Machine failure, specifications not met.
Day 5	6012	541	Coordination problems among production sections, worker skill issues
Day 6	6123	490	Coordination problems among production section, specifications not met.
Day 7	5875	764	Skills mismatch, defective and improper instructions given to workers, specifications not met.
Day 8	5367	590	Coordination delays, rework due to wrong assembly of pieces
Day 9	5590	839	Wrong specs used, malfunctioning of machines, missing instructions.
Day 10	5670	510	Defects due to work reassignments, Too many rush orders squeezing capacity

Discussion Questions:

1. What are the quality costs incurred by BGEL. Make a list identifying the connection.
2. Suggest an improvement plan.