Global Green Books Publishing is growing its eBook business, satisfying demand for

customised eBooks for the college market and for a growing number of commercial

customers. These customers expect a high$-$quality product that works in each of the

environments that their users use $$ various operating systems, eBook readers, and

hardware $($desktop computers, tablets$/$phablets$,$ and smartphones$).$

As part of the standard development process, each eBook goes through several quality

checks. When the order is received, a customer service representative checks the order and

a more senior customer service representative verifies the order. During the Production

Phase, a quality assistant will check the eBook against the job order and customer order to

make sure it is ready for production, and once approved by quality, each of the requested

eBook formats are created.

A second quality check is performed by the customer service representative who is assigned

to the customer to make sure that each requested format is ready to release to the

customer. Some customers $($and their eBook users$)$ are complaining about quality problems

in the eBooks they have received from Global Green Books. Sometimes the eBooks do not

work correctly in the intended environment. Sometimes, content is not clear or fuzzy.

Sometimes, a quality check will find that not all parts of the requested order have been

included in the eBook. This causes rework before the eBook can come back for a second

quality check before being released to the customer service representative for the final

quality check.

In each of these cases, the "cost of quality" is the cost of NOT creating a quality product.

Every time the project has to rework an eBook to correct a quality defect, the cost of quality

increases.

Samantha and her project managers met with a key group of supervisors who are managing

a critical number of the eBook projects. They reviewed the lessons learned data and

brainstormed from their experiences with producing eBooks to identify some of the quality

problems that they were seeing in the eBook projects. They identified a number of issues:

$$ The customer$$s quality requirements are never discussed within the project team. They are

dealt with by the customer service representatives at the beginning and end of the eBook

production process. This means that team members do not know what the customer expects

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and just do the tasks assigned without knowing what is $$good$.$ They may have a very

different or no understanding of what the customer$$s quality needs are, unlike the customer

service representatives.

$$ The standard job template doesn$$t suggest that supervisors plan into their project any

reviews or checkpoints at which quality can be verified. The only quality checks come after

the eBook is finished. This does quality checks of the whole eBook, but doesn$$t allow for

checks on each component $$content formats, correct conversions or desk top publishing

checks.

$$ These two factors lead to a perception among team members that quality is just simply

some testing by some other groups $($quality and customer service$),$ rather than a way of

working and reviewing or checking work as they proceed. Further, many team members

don$$t even see quality as their responsibility, because it$$s something done by someone else.

$$ One of the challenges facing the customer service representatives is that they do test each

eBook, but they cannot always check each eBook in an environment that is the same as that

used by the end users of the eBook. Sometimes users have different equipment than the

customer service representatives have to use for their testing. There are times when this

causes surprises after the eBook is released. This leads to external failure costs for dealing

with processing customer complaints, dealing with rework to fix the eBooks, and releasing a

revised eBook. Luckily the customers handle distribution to their users, so Global Green

Books is not bearing the cost of customer returns and warranty claims that they might have if

they were selling a consumer product directly to consumers.

The group agrees that they would like to make some changes to bring their total quality

costs below the costs of quality that they are currently incurring. This means that they want

to reduce the costs of failing to meet customer requirements or expectations, and reinvest

those savings into preventing problems as they go that do not meet the customer$$s

requirements, and checking to make sure that the eBook and all of its components conform

to the customer$$s requirements. Catching some of the quality problems sooner, before the

entire eBook is produced will also reduce the internal failure costs that they are

experiencing. These internal failure costs are rework and re$-$checking following the quality

checks by Quality and the customer service representative.

Questions:

$1\mathrm{.}1$ With regard to the problems that Sam