Continuous quality improvement: A study in pressure adhesive process department

Abstract

The fast-changing economic conditions such as global competition, declining profit margin, customers demand for high quality product, product variety and reduced lead time and had a major impact on manufacturing industries. To respond to these needs various industrial engineering and quality management strategies such as ISO 9000, Total Quality Management, Kaizen, Just-in-Time manufacturing, Enterprise Resource Planning, Business Process Reengineering and Lean Management have been developed. The Quality Circle was formed for the purpose of continuously improve. The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle was employed in this study. High thinner usage was identified by Prioritization Matrix Table and Fishbone Diagram was build and identified four main causes and its solution for implementation. This study successfully reduced the thinner usage by 83% which was 144 pails of thinner that only required the payback period of 23.7 days. Besides that, this study also showed the support from the top management on the continuous improvement and had improved the morale and motivation of the employee to get involvement in the future continuous improvement projects. This was aligned with the principles of TQM that emphasized on leaderships, people involvement and continuous improvement thus forming the quality organization.