Global Green Books Publishing is growing its eBook business, satisfying demand f
ID: 333185 • Letter: G
Question
Global Green Books Publishing is growing its eBook business, satisfying demand for customized 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 there users use – variou s 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 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’tallow 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.
Comment on the following aspects of the case study:
a) Consider the problems that Samantha and the group identified. What do you think are the causes of these problems?
b) What would you suggest they do differently to eliminate these problems?
c) Who should be responsible for quality? What would you recommend be the specific responsibilities of each identified role?
d)What prevention activities would you suggest to prevent poor quality in the eBook products?
Examples could be planning for quality activities or team building activities focused on improving quality
e) What appraisal activities would you suggest to evaluate the eBook product to ensure that it meets quality standards and customer requirements? Should they add in-process checks of eBook components in addition to their current final inspection/tests? If so, who should do these?
f)What would you suggest they do to involve team members more in pursuit of high quality eBooks for their customers?
Explanation / Answer
Question a). Consider the problems that Samantha and the group identified. What do you think are the causes of these problems?
Answer: Customer complaints in ebook were as follows
1. ebook is not as per existing environment
2. Contents are not clear or doubtful
3.Placed orders donot meet the requirements in ebook.
Samantha& group of team identified the following problems:
1.The customer quality requirement could not be discussed within the project team or during the process of ebook production.
2. The quality is dealt by customer service representative at the beginining and at the end of ebook production process presently.
3.The team members are not aware about customer quality requirements and their expectations from ebook.
4.To evaluate the end product as a process quality product as customer service representative is nopt aware about quality needs of customer
Causes:the main causes are
1. The production teams are not awre about customer,s quality needs and their expectations from ebook.
2.The perception of customer service representative towards quality is their normal routine and they are not tuned to excess the quality norms of producing ebook for its customer.
3.quality is continuous improvement and standard job template donot suggest that supervisor have any role during process for its review or checking for ultimate quality of ebook
4.There should be check on each components,conetnts formats and correct conversion or desk top publishing checks.
Question no.b) What would you suggest they do differently to eliminate these problems?
Answer: 1.Quality problems can be eliminated by continous improvement in ebook during its process of producing and each team members are supposed to check the quality contents on each components,contents fromats and correct conversion process of ebook.
2. Quality is the way of working by team members in production process and they should be allowed for reviewing and checking for quality during work process as they proceed.
3.Quality should be responsibility of each team members and should not leave alone to customer service represetative.
4. Make sure that ebook components should confirm to the customer,s requirements.
Question no c). Who should be responsible for quality? What would you recommend be the specific responsibilities of each identified role?
Answer:1. Each member should be responsible for quality and that is why it is admitted that quality is a way of working and internal failure costs are the rework and rechecking following quality checks by quality and customer service representative and these can be eliminated by adopting standard template suggestion box and make sure that user,s staisfaction is the ultimate quality objective of any organisation.
2.The work assigned policy should inculcate the norms of maintaining quality standards and they should be educated that our goal is to satisfy the customer,s requirements.
question no.d) What prevention activities would you suggest to prevent poor quality in the eBook products?
Answer: Prevention of quality break down can be achieved through:
1. To reduce the nombers of quality failures of ebook
2. Make ebook processes for handling prevention and failures efficiently.
3.try to maintain the customer,s requirements and their expectations updated to each work team memebrs.
4.Work instructions are written into margin with red ink and stamped by Liason Planner.
5. redefined copy of ebook should routed back to process planner to get the changes incorporated into future release of work instructions.
6.varify personnel training and certification on the basis of his qualification,training and experience and skills and also varify the equipments calibration and its assuarnce for their optimal performance and to its capabilities.
question no.e)What appraisal activities would you suggest to evaluate the eBook product to ensure that it meets quality standards and customer requirements? Should they add in-process checks of eBook components in addition to their current final inspection/tests? If so, who should do these?
Answer: The inspection and varification cost and process audit are appraisal activities and in this case it is well known facts that quality is assured by customer service representative at the beginning and in the end of ebook production and this result into increase in quality costs.
To make sure that each members of team should given work instruction to maintain quality of customers and their complaints can be accomodated during production process itself and it will defintely reduce the cost of rework and rechecking of quality.
They shoul add in process checks of ebook components in addition to their current and final checks and thereby minimising internal cost of quality and it can compensate other issues in ebook release.
Question no.f) What would you suggest they do to involve team members more in pursuit of high quality eBooks for their customers?
Answer: They should involve their team members more in pursuit of high quality of ebooks for their customers and each components and contents formats of ebook can be changed during work process and finally it should be undergoing to current and final check by customer service representative for decalring quality of ebook.
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