NV Philip Case Study

How has the emphasis of quality control changed in recent years? Describe some of the modern quality control techniques that illustrate this change in emphasis?

The emphasis of quality control is changed as the separate quality control department is closed in many organization and the quality control function is now under the department of operation management. The reasons behind this change were the high cost associated with quality control department and it was also not effective one as the quality was inspected at the end of production which was not effective technique. The number of dissatisfied customers were increasing despite of having a quality control department as it was not observing the quality of product properly. The benefits of quality control department were few while the costs was high due to more workers and resources to run the quality control department.

Due to modern quality control techniques i.e. quality control is a continuous process which should be performed at every step of production process. Under this concept, managers start believing that the quality control should be under the operations management planning process to inspect the quality of product at every step of production instead of inspecting at the end of production line. This concept gives new standards and techniques for quality control. The new standard is Six Sigma Quality which states that the standard is to achieve 3.4 defects per million units. The new techniques are Statistical Quality Control and Statistical Process Control. Statistical Quality Control states that the quality of product should be maintained from start of the production and Statistical Process Control includes the inspection of statistical samples in every step of production line.

What are the ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 standards? Why are they important?

ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization, which is an international federation which handles 140 countries’ national standard bodies. The main aim of ISO is to set the international measures for the quality of products. ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 are standards set by International Organization for Standardization. ISO 9000 is a standard which talks about the quality management and assurance standards. The latest version of this standards is ISO 9000:2004 which requires an organization to carefully determine the need of customers which are according to regulatory and legal requirement. Few other standards are also part of ISO 9000 i.e. product testing, process control storage and delivery. It states that to improve customer relations and to get higher sales, a company should make investment in making improvement in the quality of product. The important of ISO 9000 is very much as many companies of European Union requires ISO 9000 certification from other company to do business with it.

Similarly, ISO 14000 is also a standards which talks about the impact of operations of company on the environment. This standards is used for developing effective environmental management system. Its requirement includes establishing specific improvement targets, developing effective environmental policy, maintaining top management review of processes, and conducting audits of environmental programs.  ISO 14000 is important as its counts towards that social responsibility of the organizations.

PERT is a popular control method used by organizations. Explain the purpose of PERT analysis, and describe the steps involved in constructing a PERT network. Your explanation should include a discussion of the significance of the critical path in a PERT network.

Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) is a project management technique in which tasks of a project is analyzed and their completion time is estimated in three probabilities i.e. normal, optimistic and pessimistic estimates.

Steps for PERT Network are:

1. Analysis and arrangement of activities of a project according to sequence
2. Estimation of the time needed to complete in three figures i.e. normal, optimistic and pessimistic estimates.
3. On the basis of Step “a” and “b”, a PERT network is drawn
4. Identification of the critical path i.e. longest path of the project.

The identification of critical path is important as it gives an idea about the activities which are on critical path. To complete the project on time, the activities on critical path have to complete on time as they are crucial for the timely completion of the project. Project manager focuses on the critical path activities for completion the project on time.  Delay in critical path activity will delay the whole project.