Case Report
Hank Kolb, Director of Quality Assurance

Group 17
Navid Razavi
Frederike Schmidt

Introduction
The Case “Hank Kolb, Director of Quality Assurance” is about a production line of an industrial product plant, called “Greasex”. The text deals with several manufacturing problems, within the production of spraying cans for the high-technology sector, of “Greasex”, which arise from the contradiction of interests between the quality and manufacturing department, due to time pressure in the production.

First of all, the spray cans of “Greasex” have a quality issue. Due to the high pressure in the cans, there is an accidental risk for customers which could lead to a fatal image loss of the company. There are several causes mentioned by the director of quality assurance. The untrained operator for the filling equipment and the time pressure of the manufacturing personnel leads to mistakes and inaccuracies during the production. Furthermore, there is no regular maintenance of the filling equipment, which is also very old and not designed for the production line “Greasex”. This leads to high non-standard downtimes of the production process and causes the time pressure of the manufacturing personnel. Because of the time pressure coming from the production-planning department, there is an inadequate supply of nozzle heads, an important part of the cans. Due to the unbalanced amount of this parts, the company is giving rush orders to the suppliers, which ends in a lack of quality of the nozzle heads, because of the time pressure. Another cause for the quality lack of the spray cans is the special contoured design of the cans. It is uncertain whether the design has an impact on the high pressure of the cans, because the design was never tested for high filling speed. However, the director of quality assurance assumes this special design to act as a venturi.