Check

Introduction:

The cycle of the PDCA Leadership Model begins with the Check phase, because the development of the plan for quality improvements requires an understanding of the present situation.

Check phase:

The education of departmental heads continued through the steering group meetings, which occurred monthly for the first six months and quarterly thereafter. The purpose of each department in relation to the others was defined in departmental quality policy statements, translating the corporate policy in departmental terms which were communicated to all personnel.

By a process of involvement of management and supervision in a proper scheme of training and communication, identifying quality issues and effecting a resolution of them by management led improvement activities.

CONTRACTS-DRAWING OFFICE:

• Although the drawing office was actually the responsibility of the contracts department, the draughtsman had been poorly managed, often with costly results.
• The two contract managers were directed to work more closely with the draughtsman and a series of inspection checks was built into the contracts—the drawing office supply chain.
•  The draughtsman were directed to cross-check each other’s work wherever feasible and to provide regular progress reports on their project drawings. This process was supported by the instigation of formal

SITE OPERATIONS:

• In the worst instances, problems/defective work showed up at the installation stage at customer sites. One of the initial problems to be tackled here was to distinguish between errors due to site operatives and errors which site operations had little control over.
• However, the increase in the company’s workload had led to site labour being taken on who were not always up to standard; in some cases the labour recruited comprised of chancers (inexperienced) or liberty takers (unreliable). This compounded the existing situation where long-standing site labour were assigned to projects more on the basis of their friendship with the managing director rather than their ability to manage projects and other site labour.

Another source of manufacture error was the estimating department’s production scheduling, where the manufacturing locations for various drawings were decided by the managing director and general manager.

The main sources of problems here were identified as:

1. drawings which were split between the Mitcham and Haverhill works, where the standard of SMWs was inferior;

2. drawings which were offered to the self-employed SMWs on a price work basis;

3. drawings which were subcontracted to external manufacturing suppliers.

The managing director that the workshop be reorganized to accommodate manufacture by small teams, as opposed to individual work benches