Case Study: Kelowna Windings Background: Your consulting team has been engaged by Kelowna Windings to assess and make recommendations regarding quality problems at their Kelowna Plant. Kelowna Windings is a medium-sized manufacturer of wire windings used in transformer manufacturing. These windings are produced in Kelowna Windings' manufacturing plant that uses a process-type layout. Bill Dow, the Production Manager, described the windings as being of standard design. Your plant tour followed the manufacturing sequence for the windings: drawing, extrusion, winding, inspection, and packaging. After inspection, good product is packaged and sent to product storage; defective product is stored separately until it can be reworked. Defective product is reworked by a technician as manpower is available and the reworked product is packaged and sent to finished product storage. Issues, problems, and findings: Maria Lopez, Kelowna Windings' General Manager has asked the team to attend the latest meeting of the senior management team. "Let's get started please. Our company has been a shining star in a very competitive marketplace. We experienced good early growth but have stagnated this last year. Quality and on time delivery problems have become an issue. Scrap rates have climbed, and customer satisfaction is declining. We are embarking on a major quality improvement initiative to become more competitive. Specifically, Joe Wilson (Operations Manager) has experienced an increasing problem with rejected product found during the manufacturing operation." Joe Wilson began, "Rejects in the Winding Department have been a real problem the last few months. We haven't yet sourced the root cause. We would like you to look at the situation and make recommendations about how we can find out what is going on." Maria continued, "The last year has seen a decline in many things that we held for granted including revenue and profit. We must become more competitive if we are to ensure long term survival." "Senior Management has agreed on a strategy of continuous quality improvement to turn around the recent decline. As such, I have brought this team together for two reasons. First, the major quality issue with our key product, several customers have complained, and internal failures have been unacceptably high. I want this team to investigate the problems, recommend a solution and develop an implementation plan. Second, I would like the team to make recommendations on the next key steps to implementing a continuous improvement philosophy, methodology and tools." "I must catch a plane to LA for the negotiations with Humungous Transformer Corp. to secure an extension to our contract. These won't really get rolling for another couple weeks so as part of your engagement I would like a report on the existing quality problem and recommendations on the broader quality transformation we are looking for. Before I go, I will leave you with the data that has been compiled to date. Any questions?" The team's first stop was the production floor. Your discussions with the Production Supervisors in the Winding Department indicated they had no consolidated idea of what the problem(s) was or what to do to correct it. They did give you a more detailed tour of the winding operation and a copy of the Winding Department layout. There were three machines that wound wire onto plastic cores to produce the primary and secondary transformer windings. After inspection by quality control, these windings then went to the Packaging Department. Packaging personnel inspect their own work and make corrections on the spot to any packaging defects they find. The problem is, too many windings are found to be defective by QC and require reworking before they can be sent to Packaging. The next stop was the Quality Control Department where the data in the attached Excel Sheet was made available. As per the case study, your team has been asked to analyze the current situation and develop an action plan for solving the problems at Kelowna Windings. Questions: 1. Follow the problem-solving process to analyze the gathered data and make recommendations. 1.1. How would you define quality at KW? Consider "Customer Perspective" and "Producer Perspective". 1.2. Comprehensively map the business process. 1.3. Discuss what you believe the quality problems are. 1.4. Develop a Pareto diagram from all defects. Define clearly the most critical problem you intend to solve. 1.5. Stratify the data by machine. How does this affect your assessment? 1.6. Develop a Cause-and-Effect diagram for the highest priority problem. 2. Propose a recommendation to improve the existing process, based on your investigation and analysis, to the management team at Kelowna Windings. Justify your reasoning for the selected recommendation