PROCESS CONTROL
AT
POLAROID (A)
Situational Analysis
Project Greenlight:
Polaroid’s R2 factory at Waltham, Massachusetts manufactures integral film. Project Greenlight, an initiative to make quality control process more effective, has been introduced at the R2 building of Polaroid during the first six months of 1985. The Project aims to reduce quality-monitoring costs while maintaining or even improving upon the present level of product quality. The conceptualizers of the Project, George Murray and Joe O Leary, hoped to devise a method to make quality control process more effective, beyond merely reducing the number of samples taken.
Project Greenlight had three key elements.
- Statistical process control principles would be adopted: processes in control and capable of producing within specifications would produce more consistent quality.
- Production operators would be given the process control tools that the process-engineering technicians had been using and, in conjunction with sampling, would be expected to make disposition decisions themselves.
- Quality control auditors would concentrate on training operators and operationalizing specifications on new products.
Project Greenlight is an effort to shift the film production plant from a traditional Quality Control inspection mentality to a worker based process control mentality. Responsibility for quality control was now placed more with the production operators and less with the QC auditors. The idea was to standardize processes so that the defects could be identified at the nascent stage, i.e. by detecting variability in the process, and thus correctional measures could be taken early on. Thus a machine operating outside the control limits could be stopped immediately and maintenance or recalibration of the machine could be undertaken.
The benefit of this new project was projected to be multi-fold.
- A reduction in the number of defects being produced.
- A reduction in the cost of sampled scrap for quality control purposes at all the three stages: Operator sampling, QC auditor sampling and finished product sampling.
- A reduction in the number of Quality Control auditors required for the R2 plant. This would be brought about by reducing (and ultimately even terminating) the role of Quality Control auditors in identifying defectives.
