4 The country of Europia has an extensive historical and industrial heritage. It has many tourist sites (such as castles,
palaces, temples, houses and factories) which attract visitors from home and abroad. Most of these tourist sites have
gift shops where visitors can buy mementos and souvenirs of their visit. These souvenirs often include cups, saucers,
plates and other items which feature a printed image of the particular tourist site.
The Universal Pottery Company (UPC) is the main supplier of these pottery souvenir items to the tourist trade. It
produces the items in its potteries and then applies the appropriate image using specialised image printing machines.
UPC also supplies other organisations that require personalised products. For example, it recently won the right to
produce souvenirs for the Eurasian Games, which are being held in Europia in two years time. UPC currently ships
about 250,000 items of pottery out of its factory every month. Most of these items are shipped in relatively small
packages. All collections from the factory and deliveries to customers are made by a nationwide courier company.
In the last two years there has been a noticeable increase in the number of complaints about the quality of these
items. The complaints, from gift shop owners, concentrate on two main issues:
(i) The physical condition of goods when they arrive at the gift shop. Initial evidence suggests that ‘a significant
number of products are now arriving broken, chipped or cracked’. These items are unusable and they have to be
returned to UPC. UPC management are convinced that the increased breakages are due to packers not following
the correct packing method.
(ii) Incorrect alignment of the image of the tourist site on the selected item. For example, a recent batch of 100 cups
for Carish Castle included 10 cups where the image of the castle sloped significantly from left to right. These
were returned by the customer and destroyed by UPC.
The image problem was investigated in more depth and it was discovered that approximately 500 items were
delivered every month with misaligned images. Each item costs, on average, $20 to produce.
As a result of these complaints, UPC appointed a small quality inspection team who were asked to inspect one in
every 20 packages for correct packaging and correct image alignment. However, although some problems have been
found, a significant number of defective products have still been delivered to customers. A director of UPC used this
evidence to support his assertion that the ‘quality inspection team is just not working’.
The payment system for packers has also been such an issue. It was established ten years ago as an attempt to boost
productivity. Packers receive a bonus for packing more than a target number of packages per hour. Hence, packers
are more concerned with the speed of packing rather than its quality.
Finally, there is also evidence that to achieve agreed customer deadlines, certain managers have asked the quality
inspection team to overlook defective items so that order deadlines could be met.
The company has decided to review the quality issue again. The director who claimed that the quality inspection team
is not working has suggested using a Six Sigma approach to the company’s quality problems.
Required:
(a) Analyse the current and potential role of quality, quality control and quality assurance at UPC. (15 marks)
