MT475 Unit 8 DMAIC Project Charter Example

139 Wrong-Size Skylights in Thirty Days: An MT475 Unit 8 DMAIC Improvement Project Charter

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT475: Quality Management

Unit 8 Improvement Project Charter

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Overlook Skylight Company, its people and every figure are composite; the sources cited are real.

Project Title

Reducing wrong-size skylight remakes at the Lancaster plant.

Problem Statement

Over thirty production days in the spring, Overlook Skylight Company remade 139 skylights out of 19,200 built because they were the wrong size, a rate of 0.72 percent. At about $186 per remade unit and roughly 1,160 wrong-size remakes a year at that rate, the defect costs about $215,000 a year in materials and labor, before counting delayed shipments and dealer frustration. Wrong size was third among remake causes by count in the Unit 2 Pareto chart but first by cost.

Defect Definition

The definition sits near the top because every later number depends on it. A wrong-size skylight is a unit built to dimensions that do not match what the dealer's customer needed, as confirmed when the unit fails to fit its curb or is returned by the dealer for size before installation. The definition has two branches. Manufacturing error: the unit does not match the dimensions on the plant's cut list. Order entry error: the unit matches the cut list, but the cut list does not match what the dealer ordered or what the opening required. Each remake ticket is coded to one branch by the quality engineer, using the original order, the cut list and the measured unit.

Data source: coded remake tickets from the plant's quality system, cross-checked against dealer returns. Tague (2005) describes the charter as the document that keeps a team working on the same problem, and a shared definition is its foundation.

Baseline

From the thirty-day sample: 139 wrong-size remakes, 0.72 percent. Of the 139, the quality engineer's first coding assigns 54 to manufacturing error and 85 to order entry error, which already suggests where the project's attention should go.

Most wrong-size skylights were built exactly as ordered; the order itself was wrong.

Goal Statement

Reduce wrong-size remakes from 0.72 percent to 0.25 percent of skylights built within six months of the project's start, from about 1,160 a year to about 400, while holding on-time shipment at or above its current 94 percent. Pyzdek and Keller (2018) recommend that goals be specific, measurable and tied to the baseline, so that the project can be judged at its close.

Scope

In scope: the process from receipt of a dealer's order through order entry, engineering review and generation of the saw cut list, and the cutting and welding steps that turn the cut list into a frame. Out of scope: the dealer's measurement of the rough opening in the field. Field measurement is a likely contributor, but Overlook does not control it; the project will collect data on dealer measurement errors and pass them to the dealer training program without trying to fix them itself.

Team

Champion: the vice president of operations, who removes obstacles and approves resources. Project lead: the quality engineer, trained in DMAIC. Process owner: the customer service manager, who owns order entry and will own the improved process. Members: an order entry specialist, the saw operator from first shift, a welder from second shift and an engineering technician who reviews nonstandard orders.

Tollgates

Define: charter approved, week 2. Measure: defect coding validated by two independent coders on 60 tickets and a full baseline confirmed, week 6. Analyze: root causes tested for both branches, week 11. Improve: changes piloted and results compared with baseline, week 17. Control: control plan, updated work instructions and a p chart of wrong-size remakes handed to the process owner, week 22.

Risks and Constraints

The spring peak will reduce the team's available time; the champion has agreed to backfill the order entry specialist two days a week. Dealer cooperation in collecting field measurement data is voluntary. And coding remakes into two branches may be harder than it appears, which is why the Measure tollgate includes a test of coder agreement. Montgomery (2020) emphasizes that a measurement system must be shown to be reliable before its data are used to judge a process.

Measures the Team Will Track

The primary measure is wrong-size remakes as a percentage of skylights built, charted weekly on a p chart. Secondary measures are the share of remakes coded to each branch, the number of orders flagged by engineering review for unusual sizes and the on-time shipment rate, which must not fall as a side effect. The team will also log dealer measurement errors found during the project, even though field measurement is out of scope, so that the dealer training program receives evidence rather than anecdotes.

Expected Benefits

Meeting the goal would save about $141,000 a year in remake costs, about 760 fewer remakes at $186 each, and shorten lead times for affected orders. The champion will review the financial estimate with finance at the Control tollgate.

References

Montgomery, D. C. (2020). Introduction to statistical quality control (8th ed.). Wiley.

Pyzdek, T., & Keller, P. A. (2018). The Six Sigma handbook (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Tague, N. R. (2005). The quality toolbox (2nd ed.). ASQ Quality Press.