Total Quality Management Case Study (Welz Business Machines) - Essay Example

Welz Business Machines collected data for a 2 week period in order to know why some customers have to wait. Through this process data was collected on all the four reasons given above for customers having to wait. According to the information collected by the characters mentioned in the case the primary reason of the problem being faced by the company is short-staffed operators. The next two causes being receiving party not being present and operator not being able to understand the problem of the customer.

Customer being dominant in the conversation and some other causes has also been mentioned in the case. The analysis is shown below with the help of a Pareto analysis and cause and effect diagram. Pareto analysis is a technique which can be used to prioritize the different types or sources of a problem. It can be used to identify the reasons for majority of the problem being caused. It uses the Pareto principal – 80% of the problems are caused by 20% of the causes. (Pyzdek, 2003).The Pareto analysis of the case is shown below – We can see from the above analysis that 90% of the problems are being caused by three reasons – operator short staff(51%) ,Receiving party not present(22%) and lack of operator understanding(18%).

These are the areas to focus on. It is also known as the fishbone diagram or the Ishikawa diagram, named after the Japanese quality expert who made it famous. (Dale, 2007) It is basically a graphical representation of an outline that presents a chain of cause and effects. (Ishikawa & Loftus), 1990). With the analysis of the case given, various causes have been analysed because of which problems occur leading to the inability to answer customer calls effectively. These have been shown above in the form of a fish bone diagram.

As we can see from the Pareto analysis done above; shortage of staff is the root cause of the problem and accounts for 51% of the causes. Increasing the