What is your opinion of the manager’s approach? How does it compare with the Deming philosophy?

CASE STUDY

THE DISCIPLINARY CITIATION

A local delivery service has 40 drivers who deliver packages throughout the metropolitan area. Occasionally, drivers make mistakes, such as entering the wrong package number on a shipping document, failing to get a signature, and so on. A total of 280 mistakes were made in one year as shown in the Excel file C02-CaseData in the Student Companion Site for this chapter. The manager in charge of this operation has issues disciplinary citation to drivers for each mistake.

Discussion Questions

1. What is your opinion of the manager’s approach? How does it compare with the Deming philosophy?

2. How might the analysis of these data help the manager to understand the variation in the system? (Plot the data to obtain some insight.) How can the data help the manager to improve the performance of this system?