What are the most significant events in the story of how the plant survived because of its adoption of quality-based principles?
With every production at Preston Company in Preston Vancouver, there was a production sheet for analysis that was produced. This data was meant to be used by both Preston, as the producer, and Hewlett-Packard, as the consumer. The Preston team didn’t analyze this data, but HP Engineers did, and they did notice a problem. Although the Preston production team tried to solve this problem, things didn’t change since instead of stopping the process and trying to work on a new line of papers, which were not curling, they put measures to try and incorporate some changes while production was still going on.
During this period Preston was facing a major crisis. Production was high, but still, they were incurring losses. The company was in the process of being acquired by Rendell. They decided to rescue the company by addressing the issues raised by HP. They revisited challenges brought up and went back to the drawing board. This was followed by a series of adjustments in the production processes of the company and new strategies were brought and also the company decided to do away with some of the products that had already been produced and start afresh.
All these changes started to bring positive results to the production process and eventually they were all in control, and this was noticed by HP. But the company was still making losses and it needed to win the Vector project. The team at Preston Company proposed a few things that would see the company turn around. Among this was the proposal not to stop the company process but to improve on its production by coming up with a statistical process control (SPC).
Also, it was important to cut down costs of the company. Although there were no formulae to do this since the company was running at a strenuous budget. Also, the company had to come up with a new line of products to give confidence to the market. This also was a solution to their financial needs, since the new products could target a wider market.
The plant’s processes eventually were brought under control. What were the main benefits of this?
Things were coming to control and this saw the rise in profits generated and also a renewal of the contract issued by HP.
SPC is an operational-level technique of ensuring quality conformance. How many of the benefits of bringing the plant under control would you class as strategic?
Some of the strategic decisions that were met included cutting down on the labor force by retrenching some staff members in order to reduce the expenditure on the salaries. Also, the idea of stopping production completely and going back to the drawing board since the company was running into losses every day due to the fact that the machines were not in production. But this was necessary because each and every single department needed to brainstorm new ideas on how to push on ahead and rescue the company from closure. Also, the idea of coming up with a new line of products was going to be costly but was necessary for the company to make a turnaround.