This Assignment is designed to confirm your understanding of some of the most common business tools used to analyze and communicate business information.

Grading Rubric - Quality Tools
Graded Items	Points
Introduction and description of the business challenge. Include a description of what you are attempting to do, what tools you will use and why.	2
Appropriate construction of the quality tools Build the charts correctly Ensure the information is clear for decision making Ensure the reader can easily refer to the tool to confirm your conclusions Include details like titles, legends	8
An appropriate recommendation that is Supported by the analysis Appropriate and reflects good business sense	4
Professionalism & presentation Readability, grammar, spelling, section titles etc... Use of business language	2
Total	16

Your Task:  Show that you understand and can correctly utilize the Pareto Chart and Swimlane Diagram quality management tools using the following scenarios:

• The organization wants to crea a business improvement project to address some of  its business issues.  Explain the business problem, crea a Pareto Chart showing the known issues and provide a recommendation for the scope of an improvement project based on your analysis.
• The organization wants to improve its production process based on the analysis of the issues.  Crea a Swimlane diagram to accurately represents the current eBook production process.  Based on your analysis with the Pareto chart, propose an improvement (only 1) to the eBook production & quality management process.  Identify the improvement, describe the process change (using the same Swimlane diagram or a new one) and explain how it will improve this business.

The information required for this Assignment is in the scenario on the next page.

 

 

Start of Scenario for Assignment 3 - Quality Tools

Quality Management at eBook Publishing 

eBook Publishing is growing its business, satisfying demand for customized e-books for the college market and for a growing number of Commercial Customers. An e-book order is like a book order, except that the content is delivered digitally.  Orders are usually for several copies of a custom e-book, destined for End Users such as a classroom of students.  These Commercial Customers expect a high-quality product that is formatted for the digital environments of their End Users - including various operating systems, e-book readers, and hardware (desktop computers, tablets/phablets, and smartphones). 

 

 

eBook Publishing Staff: 

• Customer Service Representatives
• Senior Customer Service Representatives
• Quality Assistant
• Production Teams

 

 

As part of the standard development process, each e-book order goes through several steps. The process begins when a Customer Service Representative receives an order from their Commercial Customer.  The CSR validates that the information in the order is complete and then a Senior Customer Service Representative verifies the order is properly documented on a Job Order form.  During the production phase, Production Teams assemble one single e-book with all required additional learning material (like assignment templates, exercise files to be included with the e-book) and a Quality Assistant will check the single e-book against the Job Order to make sure it is correct and ready for production of the complete order.  Once it is approved by the Quality Assistant, all copies of the requested e-books in the order are produced in the desired formats.  A second quality check is performed by the Customer Service Representative to make sure that the order is complete and is ready to release to the Commercial Customer. 

 

Some Commercial Customers (and their End Users) are complaining about quality problems with e-books they have received from eBook Publishing. Sometimes the e-books do not work correctly in the intended digital environment.  Sometimes the content is blurry.  Sometimes, a quality check will find that the e-book order is missing parts.  These and other issues summarized in Table 1 are causing headaches.

 

Table 1 - Issues with eBooks for 1 Year

Frequency	Issue
3	Incorrect language
19	Content not clear or blurry
25	Order is missing parts
11	Incorrect title
39	Does not work properly in digital environment
4	Cover page from wrong edition

 

 

All of these issues cause some form of rework for the Production Team.  Once the Production Teams perform the rework, then the e-book must receive the approval from the Quality Assistant again before being re-done and released to the Customer Service Representative.

Every time the Production Teams must rework an e-book order to correct a quality defect, the cost of quality increases.

Some initial process review discussions have identified that:

• The customer's requirements are never discussed with the Production Teams.
• Many team members don't see quality as their responsibility, they think it should be the responsibility of the Quality Assistants.

Due to resource constraints, the e-books are not always tested in the same digital environment as the End Users prefer.