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ANSWERS TO CHAPTER 5 QUESTIONS
ANSWER 5.1
The International Standards Organization (ISO) specified a
set of quality standards in 1987. These standards focus on
defining quality control processes to maintain a quality
management system sufficient for achieving sustainable product
quality levels.
In order to become certified to these standards, a company
needs to do the following:
A. “Say what you do,” by prescribing all procedures (i.e.,
sequences of well-defined steps) engaged in a specific
engineering function such as product design, customer service,
and technology advancement.
An ISO certified company is regarded to have achieved
proficiency in practicing well-defined procedures, thus they are
also deemed able to better ensure product quality. The general
categories of ISO standards are as follows:
ISO 9000 – Quality management and assurance standards
(general guidelines, advisory)
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Each standard is described by numerous volumes of manuals. As
an example, the ISO 9002 standard covers the following
engineering activities: (1) management responsibility; (2)
quality system; (3) contract review; (4) document control; (5)
ANSWER 5.2
The engineering manager should do the following:
A. Rank order the performance of all staff in the department
based on performance criteria agreed on at the beginning of the
year.
ANSWER 5.3
The director should not approve the manager’s recommendation
of matching the competitor’s offer, and he should instead request
that the manager make a plan to cover the assignment left behind
by the engineer and double efforts of finding a replacement. They
should call in the engineer, thank her for her past contributions
to the company, and wish her well in her future professional
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ANWSER 5.4
The staggered lunch break did not allow the operators to
lunch together and then socialize for a period of time. Social
gathering and membership in a peer group are known to be an
ANSWER 5.5
The key issue involved in this situation is how to balance
the company’s long-term need to groom future leaders from within,
and the departmental need to have experienced managers to lead
and deliver short-term results. Departments are typically
operated in silos, each trying to maximize its own short-term
ANSWER 5.6
The following steps may help resolve the information over-
load problem at hand:
A. Limit informational reports to one page and exclude
supporting details. They should include the project name,
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responsible VPs who will receive all other reports with lower
budgets.
The project support details are to be preserved in full-
length reports which can be requested at a later time.
B. Use “search and compile” software to generate packages of
one-page reports in order to gain a broader perspective over
related activities in the company.
F. Consult individual contributors or department heads regarding
some of the reported projects and offer comments and feedback.
ANSWER 5.7
The following steps may help the department head to regain
control of the situation:
A. He should do his homework to understand the major issues
involved such as:
(a) Ease of use of these machines by operators (e.g., setup
time, convenience in changing tools, etc.).
B. Ask both the automation team leader and the line supervisor
to prepare and make presentations before an outside automation
expert who is to be hired by the department head as a consultant
to evaluate the proposals and offer an impartial recommendation.
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D. Implement the plan to control the situation.
ANSWER 5.8
Discrimination, favoritism and property misuse are very
serious charges. They must be dealt with immediately to avoid an
employee morale problem in the department. As director of
production, you should take the following steps to exert control
over the situation without delay:
A. Query the engineers for facts (e.g., the nature of the
incidents as well as dates, names, circumstances, facilities
involved, etc.) and ask why they think that discrimination,
favoritism and facility misuse were committed.
E. Assess if misunderstanding and/or facts unknown to the
engineers were the reasons for the complaints. Determine if the
rationale given by the manager makes sense from the company’s
perspectives. Ask whether any special assumptions were
introduced and/or personal biases factored in. Evaluate if and
to what extent discrimination, favoritism and/or property misuse
have indeed been committed by the manager.
ANSWER 5.9
Yes, the company should take the small order which may
precede more sales in the future. Accepting the small order will
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ANSWER 5.10
Technical know-how is typically derived from application
experience. It is practically useful and, although it is costly
to bring forth, it is usually not of the type which can be
patented. One example is the use of a combination of sensors and
software available in the open market to measure the tolerance of
large machined surfaces. Expertise of this type is the “tried
and true” tricks of the trade.
Usually, small businesses lack the financial resources needed
to fight against the violation of confidential agreements and the
infringement of intellectual property rights in foreign
ANSWER 5.11
The company suffers from two major policy deficiencies:
A. Authority Not Commensurate with Responsibility – Plant
managers are responsible for profitability, and Vernon Scott
controls the expenditures required to ensure profitability such
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(a) Call in Nelson and Scott to state that it was wrong for
Nelson to purchase equipment component by component and direct
Nelson not to do it again in the future. In the same meeting,
(b) Request that Scott establish a review procedure to resolve
future proposal funding disagreements. In particular:
Annual facility budget is to be prepared for review and
approval by the Executive Committee.
to be in writing.
(c) Query Nelson and other plant managers for advice on how to
revise the present budget request and approval procedures, given
the need for corporate control and the plant managers’ needs to
ensure profitability.
Answer 5.12
All workers respond to criteria by which they are measured
and compensated. This case reflects a poor management job done
with respect to setting performance standards, which emphasize
quantity of output without regard to quality of output.
The manufacturing manager needs to first define the
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A. Quantity of output.
B. “Right-first-time” rate – the percentage of products which
pass through the production system without rework and achieve