Understanding Supply Chain Management Research Paper

Type A Project:

Team of 3-4 students will study a manufacturing or service company operation; the objective is to improve the equality of their final product. This could be done through improving any task in product realization process (Design, raw material, manufacturing, packaging, after sale …). The subject of the improvement has to be directly related to quality. The team will use quality analysis and improvement methods / techniques we learn in this course (six sigma methodologies in recommended).

Ideal project will focus on problems doable during time span of the course (i.e. not to much complex, also not trivial) and demonstrate the use of quality improvement tools on solving the problem at hand.

Final report:

• Full description of your company,

• It’s quality management system.

• Quality improvement opportunities

• Implementation of quality improvement tool

• Final outcomes

• Conclusion "

Each of these aspects of the instructions is included in this paper. Moreover, the rewrite request is not disputing this fact.

Additionally, the customer sent a message prior to the initialization of work for this paper stating:

“Greeting

The course is "Quality Engineering". The project is about implementing six sigma methodologies for a local company.

Al Ain Distribution Company (AADC) in UAE has been chosen. The supply sector appointed, the data of their PO lead time for 2017 is attached.

The idea now to write a report of how to reduce the lead time using six sigma and drew charts using (Minitab). In addition, if we could add survey to the report of how the stakeholder helps us to improve the process.

I prefer to focus on SIX-SIGMA implementation part and divided it into phases and write 2-pages each:

A. Define Phase

B. Measure Phase

C. Analyze Phase

D. Improve Phase

E. Control Phase

Techniques such as Pareto Chart, Fish bone Diagram, 5 Whys, welding defects in SPARTAN Fabrication Section, Control charts could be very helpful if we could add them in the previous section."

The paper includes the requisite number of pages for each of the five phases of Six Sigma. Both Minitab and drew charts are discussed at length in this paper according to the part of the message stating “The idea now to write a report of how to reduce the lead time using six sigma and drew charts using (Minitab).” Minitab charts are included with the paper, as is a process map, and the report explains in great detail how Minitab can reduce the lead time for AADC.

However, the information in this message about “Techniques such as Pareto Chart, Fish bone Diagram, 5 Whys, welding defects in SPARTAN Fabrication Section, Control charts COULD be very helpful”. Stating these techniques COULD be helpful in a message (not in the instructions) does not mean it is a requirement to utilize each and every one of them.

It means they COULD be used, or they COULD not.

Therefore, the writer included the 5 Whys technique to improve the paper. There are statistical calculations within the paper as well as the aforementioned Six Sigma processes and Minitab methods discussed at length and their statistics

As such, the writer has fulfilled the instructions for this paper.

Type A Project Proposal

Introduction

The company that is the focus of this proposal is Al Ain Distribution Company (AADC), which is headquartered in Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. AADC is a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA). The former company was incorporated in 1999 in the United Arab Emirates in accordance with Law No. 2 of 1998 (AADC). AADC is the lone purveyor and distributor of water and electricity in Al Ain and its surrounding, rural territories, which encompasses the Eastern Region of the Abu Dhabi Emirate. A large part of its efforts include owning, maintaining, and operating the myriad of network assets for the electricity and water supply industry, including the meters and select aspects of the infrastructure necessary to supply these services. AADC furnishes water and electricity services to approximately 500,000 people; it employs roughly 2,000 employees (AADC) to do so.

It is important to realize that as a utility company servicing the general public in the aforementioned region, AADC is a governmental entity and extension of ADWEA. As such, the latter has mandated a number of strict standards for the governance and performance of the former. Specifically, ADWEA is directly accountable for multiple aspects of the policies underpinning the operations of AADC, including policies for procurement, finances, and personnel (AADC). ADWEA is also influential in pinpointing the corporate objectives of its AADC, which span a couple of different areas.

AADC is attempting to upgrade the infrastructure for this utility to assist in the improvement of customer service. In financial terms, the company seeks to decrease the amount (and need for) its governmental subsidy, while decreasing its OPEX and CAPEX expenditures (AADC). Implicit to this objective is the goal of bettering the return on financial investments. The company is also trying to meet its obligations according to regulatory entities and its operating license.

Additionally, AADC has numerous core business areas upon which it is focused. The primary goal is to sate the water and electricity needs of a diverse customer base including agricultural, residential, government and commercial users. There are several different aspects of this goal that the company must account for, including regularly testing and ensuring water quality via its laboratory services, operating and maintaining its decentralized assets network, and maintaining the implementation of customer interfaces for billing, call center, and revenue purposes. The complexity of this undertaking is aggrandized by the need to fulfill these objectives for both current and future clients. The latter involves “extension and augmentation projects” that “will satisfy the demand from new residential, agricultural and commercial customers including major developments in the Region” (AADC).…

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…lead time for its supply chain management. Evaluating the company’s quality management system revealed some notable shortcomings impeding its path to actually improving the quality of the services it renders over a significant part of the world. According to the formula discussed above, Y is the issue that the company is attempting to address. In that respect it is the outcome of the quality management system the company has in place. The ideal goal, of course, is always to improve the quality of such systems, particularly in instances such as those which AADC experienced in which there was extreme fluctuation in the number of days between a purchase order’s approval date to the receipt of the materials, and from the requisition of a purchase to the approved purchase order.

What the deployment of Six Sigma enables this company to mathematically do is element the defect that was hampering its quality management system. In the process it transforms that very system from one of quality management to one of quality improvement by understanding the weights and balances between the various inputs and their impact on the outputs. X, the considerable periods of lag time taking place from when products are essentially requisitioned to when they are actually received, operates as a defect on this quality improvement system. Therefore, it was necessary to remove this deficit that had previously hamstrung this organization. Doing so substantially mitigated its effects on the system, while reducing the measure of its weight. Instead of being commensurate the weights of the other inputs, it was effectively reduced to just a fifth of those weights. This point of differentiation in the inputs is substantially more propitious to the positive inputs that AADC has in its quality improvement system. Those inputs then, are liberated from the constraints of the negative effects in the input to produce an altogether positive effect on the principal outputs for AADC’s quality improvement system, which are represented in the company’s 2017 data as PO App to PR App and Receipt PO App.

Conclusion

It is important to recognize the contributions of the various stakeholders to implementing these quality improvement measures largely in the form of Six Sigma and drew charts on Minitab software. Minitab is actually deployed by one of the stakeholders in this process, the IT department that is employed by AADC, and which is responsible for the oversight of multiple facets of this process. Not only is this department charged with monitoring the fluctuation of the variables associated with the inputs as identified in the implementation of quality improvement tools section of this document, but it is also responsible for the maintenance, governance, and regulatory compliance of the cloud based data integration platforms—and their specialized messaging which if central to interdepartmental communication. In this respect, it represents the interests of additional stakeholders such as the aforementioned regulating body and the wide scope of customers depending on AADC.

Moreover, the financial professionals involved with AADC, both those within its corporate…