Although Sikorsky Aircraft Company has been known for its trademark quality standard since the day that it was founded, improvements are crucial for the efficacy of the firm’s performance and the satisfaction of the customers (NDT/Quality Assurance Materials & Processing Lab Quality Manager, 2016).
Moreover, given the industry that the entrepreneurship operates in, quality rates define the lives of people. In order to improve the efficiency of the safety checks that are administered regularly to the helicopters produced, one will have to reconsider the current schedule, redesign the approach toward instructing staff, and make the existing criteria available to all members of the QA team, which the DMADV tool will make possible.
As Johnson, Gitlow, Widener, and Popvich (2006) explain, it is essential to start by prioritizing goals, identifying risks, defining costs, and drafting a project plan. In the identified case, the change in the employees’ attitude toward quality provision can be viewed as the primary goal. In addition, the process of supervising the essential operations, such as the measurement process, needs to be mentioned.
Particularly, it is imperative that the momentum of specific aircraft parts, such as its hook, should equal the stated requirements. Naturally, the project will involve risks, the financial one as well as the possibility for staff motivation to drop being the key ones. It is also expected that the project will require a total of $500,000 so that the employees could receive the necessary incentives and that more accurate equipment could be bought to facilitate safety.
The measurement stage will be based on the comparison of the existing safety and quality requirements with the ones that the helicopters created at Sikorsky Aircraft have. As long as the standard error makes more than 0.2, the products designed by the company will be recalled. The project goal, therefore, can be defined as improving the safety of the helicopters produced by 75% compared to the previous items and reducing the number of defects to 1-2 per hour in accordance with the SMART framework (Jones, 2014).
The analysis of the outcomes of the plan detailed above will be carried out with the help of the correlation/regression framework. The identified concept will help figure out whether the number of reported repairs and accidents is linked to the changes made to the quality control strategy (Pyzdek & Keller, 2014).
The overall design of the process, in its turn, can be defined as the change of the employees’ organizational behavior patterns and their introduction to a new set of principles. In addition, the company’s policies concerning the significance of quality standards will have to be enhanced. Finally, it will be necessary that the manager should supervise the processes related to quality assurance. The supervision should be followed by a report detailing the key events.
Being aimed at redesigning the essential stages, yet leaving the framework of the quality assurance process intact, the DMADV tool calls for a vast improvement of the current safety check process. Seeing that people’s lives depend on whether the construction of the helicopters produced meets the existing safety standards, it is crucial to reconsider the attitude toward complying with the existing instructions. In other words, the repeatability and reproducibility of the company processes must be facilitated. The DMADV concept, in its turn, serves as the foil for the changes to occur and, at the same time, provides an array of opportunities for measuring and evaluating progress.
Reference List
Johnson, J. A., Gitlow, H., Widener, S., & Popvich, E. (2006). Designing new housing at the University of Miami: A “Six Sigma”® DMADV/DFSS case study. Duality Engineering, 18(3), 299-323.
Jones, E. (2014). Quality management for organizations using lean Six Sigma techniques. New York, NY: CRC Press.
NDT/Quality Assurance Materials & Processing Lab Quality Manager. (2016). Web.
Pyzdek, T., & Keller, P. (2014). Project management using DMAIC and DMADV. In The Six Sigma handbook (4th ed.) (pp. 213-244). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.