Chocolate ice cream with a peanut butter swirl. The product has several quality problems:

1. It tempers very slowly, so it is hard to scoop.

2. The peanut butter swirl tends to fall to the bottom of the tub, resulting in very little peanut butter in the top 2/3 of the container and way too much peanut butter in the bottom third.

Questions to Answer

1. For each scenario listed below, describe a basic quality tools you could use and why you would use that tool.

a. Figure out where in the process the quality defects were occurring.

b. Track the number of defective tubs over time and look for patterns in the data.

c. Determine if any one of the three blast freezers used to harden the ice cream after processing had consistently more or fewer tubs of defective ice cream.

2. Many of the quality management programs have taking a "process approach" as a core principle. What does this mean? In a few sentences, describe how would you take a process approach to solving the slow tempering problem.

3. Management has made the decision to reprocess defective ice cream tubs. If the tubs cannot be reprocessed, they will be discarded.

a. What type of quality cost is this?

b. If the process is changed to decrease the number of defective tubs and the operators need to be trained on the new process, what type of quality costs are these?

c. Do you think that the costs involved in process changes and employee training can be justified or should the defective product continued to be reworked? Explain your answer.

4. The five main steps in Six Sigma are DEFINE, MEASURE, ANALYZE, IMPROVE, and CONTROL. Explain briefly how this process can be applied to the problem of having the peanut butter swirl fall to the bottom of the tub.

5. Management realizes that something needs to be done about the ice cream quality problems. One manager, not understanding good quality management practices, decides to give a monthly bonus to the shift that produces the lowest number of defective tubs.

a. Explain why is this a poor quality management practice.

b. How can the manager apply good quality management principles to encourage his workers to reduce the number of defective tubs?

6. The company does decide to alter their process and is now producing ice cream with significantly fewer defects. Since their process changed, they need to redo their Failure Mode and Effect Analysis.

a. Why should the company redo the FMEA on this process after changing it?

b. How and why would the risk priority number change if:

i. Consumers were much more tolerant of a defect than previously thought?

ii. A certain failure that initially had only one effect now causes several more failures down the line?

iii. New processing equipment was able to catch 50% more of a certain packaging failure?