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Alice Guram
With ISO 9000 standardisation becoming the norm and quality becoming the buzzword in industry circles, most companies are gearing up to meet the demands of this standardisation.
Take the case of Samsung India Electronics. The company recently decided to reduce the total time loss in production per day from 63 minutes to 15 minutes. Using the techniques involved in subject selection, data collection, target setting, cause analysis, working out counter measures and proper standardisation of work procedures, the time loss was brought down to 12 minutes, in a span of six months.
According to K S Kim, managing director, Samsung India Electronics: ``Our success at the `Quality Circle' activity is the result of our bottoms up approach to establishing quality systems at the factory. It is based on the thinking that the individual creativity of our line operators can be channelised into continuously improving the quality of our products and ultimately improving the productivity and efficiency of our productionline. Further, our efforts in setting up a well-defined quality system at the Noida CTV facility, from the raw material stage till the final stage of packaging and delivery of products, is derived from the parent company's quality over quantity philosophy.''
The `Quality Circle' activity was initiated by Samsung India in September 1997 to involve line operators in the quality process in production, production engineering, quality, purchase and support at different levels. The idea was to interact with each other once a week to discuss, analyse and solve problems pertaining to their respective work areas. Frequent training programmes were conducted to upgrade the knowledge and skills of the Quality Circle members.
The company has been carrying out specific TQM programmes, campaigns and activities to ensure that its basic quality objectives are met. In April 1998, a 10-member `Defect Control Team' was formed with members drawn fromvarious CTV manufacturing departments--production, production engineering,quality assurance. Their task was cut out--to continuously analyse process defects and bring down the defect rate. The target they set upon themselves was to bring down the defect ratio by about 50 per cent in a span of three months. Having achieved this rate in November 1998, they have now set for themselves the task of bringing down the defect rate to 0.9 per cent in the next three months.
To include quality management at the shop-floor level, the company initiated two Pro 3 PM and 5S campaigns in the factory in December 1997. The Pro 3 M campaign or the `My Machine, My Job, My Area' campaign in conjunction with the 5S campaign, seeks to instill the sense of housekeeping in all line operators by making each individual responsible for his/her area. The 5S technique relates to cleanliness of the workplace--sorting out and discarding unnecessary items, arranging a place for everything, cleaning the workplace and maintaining a standard and discipline for cleanliness. Total Productive Maintenance extends thisconcept a little further and entails training the workers and the operator to clean, maintain and handle minor problems of the machine by themselves.
The Productivity Quality System has also been implemented in the factory since May. It provides on-line information on the production line such as current production status, defect rate, line wise output, production plan, etc.
A tangible result of all these activities is a double rise in productivity. From a level of 10.3 in December 1997, it has doubled to 21.8 in November and the company plans to triple the same by the end of 1999.
In addition, the company has a monthly evaluation system for its vendors based on their quality and delivery performance.
Samsung also conducts regular monthly meetings with its vendors for discussing in-coming material, quality control issues and line rejections.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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