Mini Case Study: Quality Management At Global Green Books
Mini Case Study Quality Management At Global Green Books Publishinggl
Mini-Case Study: Quality Management at Global Green Books Publishing Global Green Books Publishing is growing its eBook business, satisfying the demand for customized eBooks for the college market and for a growing number of commercial customers. These customers expect a high-quality product that works in each of the environments that their users use – various operating systems, eBook readers, and hardware (desktop computers, tablets/phablets, and smartphones). As part of the standard development process, each eBook goes through several quality checks. When the order is received, a customer service representative checks the order and a more senior customer service representative verifies the order.
During the Production Phase, a quality assistant will check the eBook against the job order and customer order to make sure it is ready for production, and once approved by quality, each of the requested eBook formats is created. A second quality check is performed by the customer service representative who is assigned to the customer to make sure that each requested format is ready to release to the customer. Some customers (and their eBook users) are complaining about quality problems in the eBooks they have received from Global Green Books. Sometimes, the eBooks do not work correctly in the intended environment. Sometimes, content is not clear or fuzzy.
Sometimes, a quality check will find that not all parts of the requested order have been included in the eBook. This causes rework before the eBook can come back for a second quality check before being released to the customer service representative for the final quality check. In each of these cases, the "cost of quality" is the cost of NOT creating a quality product. Every time the project has to rework an eBook to correct a quality defect, the cost of quality increases. Samantha and her project managers met with a key group of supervisors who are managing a critical number of eBook projects.
They reviewed the lessons learned data and brainstormed from their experiences with producing eBooks to identify some of the quality problems that they were seeing in the eBook projects. They identified a number of issues:
ï‚· The customer’s quality requirements are never discussed within the project team. They are dealt with by the customer service representatives at the beginning and end of the eBook production process. This means that team members do not know what the customer expects and just do the tasks assigned without knowing what is “good”. They may have a very different or no understanding of what the customer’s quality needs are, unlike the customer service representatives.
ï‚· The standard job template doesn’t suggest that supervisors plan into their project any reviews or checkpoints at which quality can be verified. The only quality checks come after the eBook is finished. This doesn’t allow for checks on each component – content formats, correct conversions or desktop publishing checks.
ï‚· These two factors lead to a perception among team members that quality is just simply some testing by some other groups (quality and customer service), rather than a way of working and reviewing or checking work as they proceed. Many team members don’t even see quality as their responsibility, because it’s something done by someone else.
ï‚· One of the challenges facing the customer service representatives is that they cannot always check each eBook in an environment that is the same as that used by the end-users of the eBook. Sometimes users have different equipment than the customer service representatives have for testing. This causes surprises after release, leading to external failure costs such as customer complaints and rework. Fortunately, because customers handle distribution, Global Green Green Books doesn’t bear the full cost of customer returns.
The group agrees they want to reduce these quality costs by making changes to prevent problems before they happen and to ensure their products conform to customer requirements. Catching quality issues early reduces internal failure costs associated with rework and rechecking.
Considering these problems, causes, and potential improvements, they need a strategic approach emphasizing prevention, responsibility, and continuous quality improvement.