GM593 Unit 7 Corrective Action Plan Example

Not a Second Crew: A Unit 7 Corrective Action Plan Aimed at the Signature That Holds Every Box

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM593: Project Execution With Monitoring and Control

Unit 7 Corrective Action Plan

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The university, its relocation project, its staff and every figure are composite and illustrative; the methods cited are real.

The Cause, Restated

The variance memo found that the Hollis Hall relocation is limited by EHS sign-off of hazardous materials manifests. Two chemical safety officers, instead of the planned three, are signing every manifest. Between them they now sign roughly 670 equivalent units a week, well short of the 1,050 the plan assumed. At the end of month five, 2,050 packed items were waiting for a signature, and movers logged 212 hours of waiting in a single month.

The Remedies

Each proposed remedy is judged by the dependency it acts on, its effect on weekly capacity at the constraint, its cost and funding, and its owner.

A second packing crew. Acts on: packing, which is not the constraint. Effect on sign-off capacity: none; it would add about 400 equivalent units a week to the queue waiting for signatures. Cost: $96,000 for twelve weeks. Owner: not assigned. Declined. Eliyahu Goldratt's central point is that adding capacity anywhere but the constraint only builds inventory in front of it (Goldratt & Cox, 2004). Here the inventory is packed boxes, which take space in labs still doing research and cannot legally move.

Tiered hazard review. Acts on: the time each signature takes. The university's chemical hygiene officer has approved a two-tier review. Containers of low-hazard materials, such as buffers, salts and sealed reagent kits, get a shortened check of about two minutes against the lab's inventory, instead of the full six-minute review used for flammables, corrosives, toxics and reactives. About 45 percent of the remaining containers qualify. Effect: about 210 more equivalent units signed a week. Cost: none beyond half a day of training. Owner: EHS director.

A contract safety specialist. Acts on: the number of people who can sign. A contract industrial hygienist, qualified under the university's policy, will sign manifests for low-risk lab packs for ten weeks. Effect: about 250 equivalent units a week. Cost: $46,000, from project contingency. Owner: EHS director.

A rented ultra-low freezer. Acts on: biological sample transfers, which require a qualified freezer in the new building before samples can be signed out of Hollis Hall. The permanent freezers each need a 72-hour temperature qualification, and only two can be qualified at once. A rented, pre-qualified freezer placed in the new building lets sample boxes move while the permanent units are qualified, about halving the queue of samples waiting for transfer. Cost: $6,400 for ten weeks. Owner: facilities coordinator.

The approved remedies cost $52,400 and add about 460 units of signing capacity a week, while the crew the movers offered would have cost $96,000 and added none.

Expected Result

With tiered reviews and the contract specialist, weekly sign-off capacity should rise from about 670 to about 1,130 equivalent units, slightly above the original plan of 1,050. Raising capacity alone would only stop the queue from growing, because packing continues at close to its planned pace. To shrink it, packing will be held to about 900 equivalent units a week for six weeks once the remedies start, with the freed crew hours spent labeling shelves and staging carts in the new building. Signing about 1,130 units a week against 900 packed should cut the queue by roughly 1,250 items, bringing it below 1,000 by week 30. The item stream's SPI should begin to recover in month seven, once more signed items reach the trucks.

Why Hold Packing Back

Slowing the crews feels wrong when the project is behind, and the movers will object that their crews are idle. But packing faster than the constraint can sign only moves boxes from shelves to the floor, where they block lab benches and fire exits in a building still in use. The Project Management Institute's guidance on managing flow favors limiting work in progress so that finished work moves steadily rather than piling up between steps (Project Management Institute, 2021). Holding packing to the signing rate is that principle applied to a move.

Funding

The contract specialist and the freezer are funded from contingency, which falls by $52,400. The steering group should also stop the casework installers' overtime, as the variance memo recommended, which saves about $9,000 a month and offsets part of the drawdown.

The Next Bottleneck

Once sign-off capacity rises, the constraint will move. The most likely next constraint is verification at the new building, where each principal investigator's delegate must confirm items in place. Delegates are graduate students and lab managers with research duties, and their availability is irregular. To prepare, the facilities coordinator will schedule verification windows with each lab two weeks ahead and add a second loading dock slot on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Goldratt's process of ongoing improvement expects exactly this: once one constraint is relieved, the next one must be identified and managed (Goldratt & Cox, 2004).

Verification Test

The plan will be judged on a dated test. By the end of week 30, weekly sign-offs must reach at least 1,050 equivalent units for two consecutive weeks, and the queue of items awaiting a signature must fall below 1,000. If either test fails, the steering group will review the remedies at its next meeting. Quentin Fleming and Joel Koppelman stress that a corrective action should be followed by a measurable check of whether performance has actually changed (Fleming & Koppelman, 2010).

References

Fleming, Q. W., & Koppelman, J. M. (2010). Earned value project management (4th ed.). Project Management Institute.

Goldratt, E. M., & Cox, J. (2004). The goal: A process of ongoing improvement (3rd rev. ed.). North River Press.

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.).