Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode
EPGP 13: End Term Examination (Quarter- 4)
Quality Management
Instructors: Prof. Sandip Barui Total Marks: 60
Prof. Saparya Suresh Duration: 2.5 hours
Instructions
o All questions are compulsory.
o This is an open book-proctored exam. Only textbook, reading materials, cases and lecture slides and
handouts are allowed.
o Answers should be type written in a single word document. All the graphs and relevant excel workout
should be explicitly included or summarised in the word document by copying-pasting. Embedded
worksheets or references to worksheet instead of written answers would not be considered for
evaluation. However, excel workbooks should be submitted along with final answer. Finally, both
word document and excel sheet should be submitted compressed in a .zip folder. Name the .zip folder
as ‘Course Code Your Name (As per IIMK records) _Roll Number’
Question 1 (10 marks)
1. Explain the concept of House of Quality and indicate with the help of a diagram what are
the different matrices in HOQ? (5 marks)
2. In the relationships matrix of the House of Quality, if there is a row with no marks in the
matrix, what does it indicate. Also, if there is a column with no marks in the matrix, what
does it indicate? (2 marks)
3. Imagine a House of Quality for a food processor has two engineering characteristics
“Ease of Cleaning” and “Quiet Operation”. If an engineer wishes to express the fact that
design features that tend to improve “Ease of Cleaning” also tend to make the food
processor louder in operation, what should the engineer record in the House of Quality
(and where)? (3 marks)
Question 2 (10 marks)
Freud and Old (F&O) is a big consulting firm and advice clients on accounting compliance.
Since, some new regulations such as GST has emerged, the F&O would like to train their
auditors on the same. Since, the timeline for next tax filing is short, the training manager of
F&O chose 3 training organizations to impart this specialized training. The effectiveness of the
training is measured on a rating scale from 0 to 100. The F&O has categorized its auditors in to
three groups, depending on their number of years of experience. Three auditors are selected from
each group and are randomly assigned to the training programs offered by these 3 organizations.
The table shown below depicts the ratings assigned by the auditors after they completed the
training program.
Training Organization
Years of 1 2 3
experience
0-5 70 65 81
5-10 75 80 87
10-15 87 82 94
a. List down the response variable and factors
b. Identify the levels for each factor. How many experiments are to be conducted?
c. Can we do multiple replications here? Explain.
d. Give examples of some noise/uncontrollable factors (at least two) in this situation
e. The manager of F&O did not worry about the Gender of the auditors. If so, which
terminology must be used in DoE, if you want to control for it?
Question 3 (40 marks)
Case Study Analysis
Company X is a manufacturer of AA batteries. Consider lifetimes (in hours) of AA batteries
when put in constant use, i.e., keeping flashlight ‘on’ till the battery dies. Recently, with
advancement in technology, other companies manufacturing AA batteries claim that the lifetime
of AA battery is significantly greater than the ones manufactured by company X. This motivated
company X to investigate several quality characteristics for AA batteries. The objectives of the
investigation are as follows:
I. Figuring out if indeed the lifetime of AA battery manufactured by company X is less
than their friendly competitor, company Y, who is ready to help company X by sharing
process data
II. Identifying the action items to be carried out if indeed the lifetimes of the batteries
manufactured by company X are significantly lesser than the ones manufactured by
company Y
III. Verifying whether the manufacturing process is in control and capable
IV. Devising a single acceptance sampling plan before releasing any battery lot for sale to
the market
Following are the details with respect to the objectives.
Objective I:
The following data were obtained on AA battery lifetimes in hours:
Company X:
3, 4.5, 4.5, 3.9, 5.2, 6.2, 3.9, 2.2, 3.6, 6,
3.2, 5.6, 3.7, 4.6, 4.4, 5.4, 4.2, 5.1, 3.3, 4.9,
2.3, 4.5, 3.7, 4.1, 3.9, 3.8, 4.7, 4.8, 4.1, 4.1
Company Y:
10.9, 8.2, 5.7, 5, 6.6, 5.6, 7.4, 6.7, 7.1, 4.5,
7.7, 6.2, 7.4, 6, 8.2, 9.1, 8.2, 6.5, 6.6, 9.6,
8.6, 7.2, 7.3, 6.8, 10.2, 8.6, 6.8, 8.6, 7.3, 9
The above data are given in an excel sheet titled ‘lifetime_data.xlsx’.
If shapes of the distributions of battery lifetimes for both companies show similarity and the
average battery lifetime for company X is less than average battery lifetime for company Y by 2
hours, then the manufacturing process indicates difference and battery lifetime for company X
will be considered significantly lesser than the battery lifetime for company Y.
Objective II:
In case of the battery lifetime for company X is significantly lesser than that the battery lifetime
for company Y, the following action items are suggested.
1. Install an R&D team for the following tasks:
a. To find alternative materials to Zinc (Zn, for negative electrode) and
Manganese Dioxide (MnO2, for positive electrode). If cheaper alternatives are
available, assess the alkaline toxicity and suggest materials which can
neutralize the toxicity. If cheaper alternatives are not available, then other
structural changes of battery should be considered in a team meeting after a
period of 6 months.
b. To reduce the width of the cylindrical wall of battery by 10% and check the
effect on the battery lifetime. Carry out the experiment for 1000 batteries.
Apply regression model to analyze data. If more than 5% of batteries get too
hot (>40C), then stop the process.
2. Typically, battery shelf-life, when stored in room temperature, is between 5 to 10
years. Carry out an experiment to study the shelf-life of batteries for a period of 1 year
to check what percentage of batteries show shelf-life of less than 1 year. During this
one year if the head of experimenter team changes, then the assistant will be made the
head of the team and a new person will be hired as an assistant.
Objective III:
1. An employee is responsible for collecting manufactured battery sample of size
between 50 and 60 every day at 4 pm for a period of consecutive 25 days every 3
months, and collect data on the daily number of defective batteries. A relevant quality
control chart is given in Figure 1.
Figure 1.
2. According to customer specifications, standard AA battery length should be between
49.0 mm and 50.5 mm. Assuming the lengths to be normally distributed, the average
and the standard deviation of the lengths are 49.9 mm and 0.2 mm, respectively.
Objective IV:
Before sending out any batch of batteries (typically of size 10000) to market, company X decides
to carry out an acceptance sampling based on a single sampling plan. An internal decision is
taken that acceptable quality level/limit (AQL) should be 1% while lot tolerance percent
defective (LTPD) is obtained as 5% from a market survey. A producer’s risk of 10% and a
consumer’s risk of 8% are considered logical for the plan.
Based on the case study, please do the following.
1. Objective I:
a. [1] What kind of tool/graph will be useful to accomplish objective I?
b. [4] Please use the data given in the excel sheet ‘lifetime_data.xlsx’ and
construct the relevant graph/diagram to understand the shapes of the
distributions. Copy the relevant graphs as images from the excel sheet and
paste on the word document. Properly label them.
c. [2] Comment (with reasons) on whether the manufacturing process indicates
difference, and battery lifetime for company X is significantly lesser than the
battery lifetime for company Y.
2. [10] Objective II:
Construct a tree diagram and flowchart based process decision program chart (PDPC)
from the information given under objective II. Please don’t write any separate logic,
just the diagram is sufficient.
3. Objective III:
a. [2] What type of control chart is drawn in Figure 1? Justify.
b. [1] What measure (joined by the red line) is plotted in Figure 1?
c. [2] What do you infer about the process from Figure 1? Justify.
d. [1] What does the center line represent in Figure 1?
e. [1] Is the process distribution with respect to battery length centered? Justify.
f. [3] Calculate relevant process (with respect to battery length) capability index
value and comment on the process capability.
4. Objective IV:
a. [6] Use MS Excel to figure out sample size ‘n’ and acceptance number ‘c’
corresponding to the single acceptance sampling plan. Carry out this exercise
in EXCEL. Copy-paste the tables from EXCEL to the WORD document file.
Include the EXCEL sheet separately as a part of the .zip folder.
b. [5] Construct an operating characteristic curve (OCC) based on ‘n’ and ‘c’ for
the using lot proportion of defectives ‘p’={0, 0.01, …, 0.3}. Just copy-paste
the graph from EXCEL in your answer sheet with proper labelling.
c. [2] Calculate the average outgoing quality (AOQ) value for p=0.05.
