dc.description.abstract | Due to the fierce market competition, small and medium companies in Taiwan need to constantly improve the quality of their products and services to enhance the competitiveness. Then, process improvement has been an important issue for these companies. This study investigates a real case that a domestic Gasket seal manufacturing company used the methodology of Six Sigma, DMAIC, that is define-measure-analyze-improve-control, to improve their business processes. Three Six Sigma projects were investigates in this study, including mold exchange time reduction project, mold management project, and key customer VMI process improvement project. These three projects respectively represent the process of production, general management, and customer service and coordination in supply chain issues. This study describes in detail the five stages of Six Sigma in the three projects and how to use the tools to improve their processes, for example, defining the scopes and objectives of projects, recognizing the voice of customers, identifying the performance indices of processes, measuring the original processes, analyzing the real causes of process problems, creating and implementing the improvements, checking the performance of all improvements, and designing the new standards of processes. Numerous improvement actions were implemented. Some control plans were developed to sustain and enhance the performance of the processes. Additionally, the key benefits of, and experience gained from these projects are emphasized.
The three Six Sigma projects have brought excellent benefits, including productivity and efficiency increasing, cost reduction, inventory decreasing and customer satisfaction improvement. The employees of the company learned the systematic improvement process and tools of Six Sigma by doing. The company further integrated the Six Sigma methods with the existing quality systems, like ISO 9000. The most important thing is that quality concepts must be embedded into the design of process and that just monitoring quality at an operational level does not suffice. The projects in the case company provide a good reference for other small and medium companies that plan to implement Six Sigma management.
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