Team Assignment 4: Quality
Part A: In-Flight Crew
Although Southwest Airlines looks to provide an enjoyable and relaxing flight experience for their
passengers, unfortunately, not all passengers will be satisfied at all times. There has been numerous
complaints to the airline regarding the interactions with the flight crew and the overall in-flight
experience.
The quality control manager at SWA wants to understand the reasons why passengers may complain
about the crew or in-flight experience. Help her out by building a cause-effect (or fishbone) diagram to
identify as many reasons as possible for why there may be complaints about the in-flight experience. All
charts should be created in Word (I do not want any hand-drawn charts).
Part B: Delayed Flights
Southwest Airlines is quite proud of their safety record and their timely departures and arrivals. In order
to determine if there is a significant change in the number of flights delayed more than 30 minutes, For
three months, Southwest Airlines randomly selected 100 flights per day and reported how many were
delayed by more than 30 minutes. Here is the data collected:
DATE
DELAYED
FLIGHTS
DATE
DELAYED
FLIGHTS
DATE
DELAYED
FLIGHTS
DATE
DELAYED
FLIGHTS
DATE
DELAYED
FLIGHTS
1-Sep 4 21-Sep 2 11-Oct 1 31-Oct 6 20-Nov 3
2-Sep 8 22-Sep 6 12-Oct 7 1-Nov 0 21-Nov 7
3-Sep 4 23-Sep 0 13-Oct 0 2-Nov 16 22-Nov 5
4-Sep 0 24-Sep 6 14-Oct 4 3-Nov 1 23-Nov 7
5-Sep 0 25-Sep 1 15-Oct 1 4-Nov 2 24-Nov 7
6-Sep 4 26-Sep 1 16-Oct 5 5-Nov 2 25-Nov 1
7-Sep 7 27-Sep 2 17-Oct 3 6-Nov 2 26-Nov 3
8-Sep 3 28-Sep 4 18-Oct 0 7-Nov 2 27-Nov 3
9-Sep 0 29-Sep 17 19-Oct 2 8-Nov 6 28-Nov 4
10-Sep 4 30-Sep 4 20-Oct 7 9-Nov 3 29-Nov 4
11-Sep 5 1-Oct 4 21-Oct 0 10-Nov 0 30-Nov 1
12-Sep 6 2-Oct 3 22-Oct 1 11-Nov 4
13-Sep 4 3-Oct 5 23-Oct 4 12-Nov 8
14-Sep 11 4-Oct 8 24-Oct 1 13-Nov 15
15-Sep 7 5-Oct 4 25-Oct 0 14-Nov 6
16-Sep 0 6-Oct 4 26-Oct 5 15-Nov 1
17-Sep 4 7-Oct 7 27-Oct 3 16-Nov 4
18-Sep 2 8-Oct 5 28-Oct 4 17-Nov 8
19-Sep 3 9-Oct 11 29-Oct 7 18-Nov 3
20-Sep 10 10-Oct 3 30-Oct 5 19-Nov 6
Use this sample to assess the quality of the airplane seats.
a. What type of control chart should be used here? Why?
b. What is the centerline of the chart? What is the lower control limit? The upper control
limit?
d. What statistic should be plotted on the control chart for each sample?
e. Create a control chart. Copy and paste the control chart into your Word document.
f. Is this system under control?
g. What advice would you provide to the quality control engineer at Southwest?
Team Assignment 4: QualitySouthwest Airlines is quite proud of their safety record and their timely departures and arrivals. In order to determine i.
Team Assignment 4 Quality Part A In-Flight Crew Al.docx
1. Team Assignment 4: Quality
Part A: In-Flight Crew
Although Southwest Airlines looks to provide an enjoyable and
relaxing flight experience for their
passengers, unfortunately, not all passengers will be satisfied at
all times. There has been numerous
complaints to the airline regarding the interactions with the
flight crew and the overall in-flight
experience.
The quality control manager at SWA wants to understand the
reasons why passengers may complain
about the crew or in-flight experience. Help her out by building
a cause-effect (or fishbone) diagram to
identify as many reasons as possible for why there may be
complaints about the in-flight experience. All
charts should be created in Word (I do not want any hand-drawn
charts).
Part B: Delayed Flights
Southwest Airlines is quite proud of their safety record and
their timely departures and arrivals. In order
to determine if there is a significant change in the number of
flights delayed more than 30 minutes, For
three months, Southwest Airlines randomly selected 100 flights
per day and reported how many were
delayed by more than 30 minutes. Here is the data collected:
DATE
4. a. What type of control chart should be used here? Why?
b. What is the centerline of the chart? What is the lower control
limit? The upper control
limit?
d. What statistic should be plotted on the control chart for each
sample?
e. Create a control chart. Copy and paste the control chart into
your Word document.
f. Is this system under control?
g. What advice would you provide to the quality control
engineer at Southwest?
Team Assignment 4: QualitySouthwest Airlines is quite proud
of their safety record and their timely departures and arrivals.
In order to determine if there is a significant change in the
number of flights delayed more than 30 minutes, For three
months, Southwest Airlines rand...Use this sample to assess the
quality of the airplane seats.a. What type of control chart should
be used here? Why?b. What is the centerline of the chart?
What is the lower control limit? The upper control limit?d.
What statistic should be plotted on the control chart for each
sample?e. Create a control chart. Copy and paste the control
chart into your Word document.f. Is this system under
control?g. What advice would you provide to the quality control
engineer at Southwest?
•
5. May 14, 2011
Behind the Greening of Wal-
Mart
By BRYAN BURROUGH
GIVEN our daily struggles with information overload, I suppose
it’s inevitable
that there will always be major, perhaps global, issues that some
of us simply
don’t follow. Bosnia was like that for me. As serious as I knew
the situation
was, it went on for so long that I finally just gave up.
My latest intellectual Bosnia has been the knot of issues that’s
come to be
known as “sustainability.” In this regard, I suspect I’m not
alone, especially
among business people, many of whom still tend to associate
these ideas with
increased cost and government regulation.
The idea that “going green” could actually be profitable, a
notion put forth by
economists as long as 20 years ago, remains a source of
skepticism in some
quarters. If you still need convincing, pick up Edward Humes’s
excellent new
book, “Force of Nature” (Harper Business, 265 pages, $27.99),
the story of how
the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, came to go green. I’ll
wager that you
won’t look at sustainability issues quite the same way again. It
certainly opened
my eyes.
6. This little book is easily read in two airplane flights, and it’s
well worth the
time. Mr. Humes, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1989 for articles
about the military,
tells how Jib Ellison, a onetime California river-rafting guide,
all but
singlehandedly persuaded Wal-Mart to embrace sustainability as
part of its core
culture. Starting with a meeting in 2004 with H. Lee Scott Jr.,
then Wal-Mart’s
chief executive, Mr. Ellison demonstrated that sustainability
wasn’t just tree-
hugger talk. In its simplest form, sustainability means
eliminating waste. And
eliminating waste saves money. That got Mr. Scott’s attention.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/wal_ma
rt_stores_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org
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ulitzer_prizes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
http://www.nytimes.com/
One of Mr. Ellison’s first projects for Wal-Mart showed how
easily this could
be accomplished. He noticed that the colorful cardboard
packaging for the
company’s Chinese-made toy trucks was far larger than needed.
He suggested
reducing the size, which saved millions of dollars, not to
mention hundreds of
thousands of tons of cardboard that otherwise would find its
way into landfills.
That, in turn, led to a Wal-Mart crusade to reduce packaging
size across its
7. product lines, saving the company an estimated $3.4 billion a
year — that’s
billion with a “b” — while reducing trash. Since that first
initiative, Wal-Mart
has charted a new green course that’s been widely noticed, and
imitated,
throughout the corporate world.
The company has brought in eco-friendly consultants who have
helped find
innovative ways to reduce waste almost everywhere, from the
use of chemicals
to something as simple as installing electrical generators in the
trucking fleet, so
that refrigerated trucks don’t have to idle overnight. In recent
years Mr. Scott
pushed green initiatives even further, forcing thousands of Wal-
Mart suppliers
to embrace sustainability as well.
The author makes clear that Wal-Mart did not embark on this
course out of a
sense of corporate do-goodism. The company, the book says,
had long had an
insular culture that looked askance at outsiders, especially those
who wanted it
to change — and that went double for environmentalists.
At the time Mr. Ellison walked into Mr. Scott’s office, the
company was being
pummeled by a multitude of opponents, from environmentalists
to entire city
governments, accusing it of driving mom-and-pop retailers out
of business,
underpaying its “associates” and union-busting. Going green has
given Wal-
8. Mart a badly needed public-relations boost as it continues to
face harsh criticism
on those other fronts.
But once Mr. Scott saw that sustainability could be profitable,
he went whole
hog. Mr. Ellison took Mr. Scott and others on scores of side
trips to make his
points — for example, showing an executive in apparel
merchandising just how
chemical-laden a conventional cotton farm in Turkey was,
compared with an
organic farm just across the road. If you could sell an organic
cotton T-shirt for
the same price as the chemically treated shirt — and you could,
Mr. Ellison
showed — why wouldn’t you?
Eventually, Wal-Mart came to embrace a wide spectrum of
environmental
causes, not just for the P.R. and bottom-line benefits, but also,
as Mr. Humes
demonstrates, for its future. Wal-Mart shoppers are mostly
women, and the next
generation of women shoppers — today’s teenage girls — tend
to feel very
strongly about sustainability issues. If Wal-Mart didn’t go
green, Mr. Scott told
his people, the shoppers of 2020 would quickly go to Target.
Mr. Scott retired in
2009, but Wal-Mart’s commitment to sustainability has
remained strong under
his successor, Mike Duke.
9. THE results have been impressive, on items big and small.
According to Mr.
Humes, it reduced its overall carbon emissions rate by 16
percent from 2005 to
2008. Wal-Mart’s 2010 progress report on sustainability also
shows that it
sharply reduced its use of plastic bags; donated to food banks
127 million
pounds of food that previously would have been discarded;
reduced printouts of
store reports by 350 million pieces of paper, saving it $20
million; and sharply
reduced or eliminated phosphates in the dish and laundry
detergents it sells in
many countries.
“Force of Nature” doesn’t offer the compelling business
narrative of some other
books — there are no boardroom shouting matches, or much
drama at all — but
that doesn’t matter. Mr. Humes does here what the very best
business books do.
He finds a good story to help illuminate an issue of surpassing
importance.
The book doesn’t contain much more information than your
average Fortune
magazine cover article, but Mr. Humes’s prose is almost
flawless, lean and
clear, egoless and spare. He doesn’t deify or demonize Wal-
Mart or any of the
characters; in fact, he says Wal-Mart’s very business model is
probably
unsustainable. This is first-rate work — both by the author and
by Wal-Mart
10. itself.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/f
ood_banks/index.html?inline=nyt-classifierBehind the Greening
of Wal-MartBy BRYAN BURROUGH
BW 50 June 11, 2009, 5:00PM EST text size: TT
Nike Quietly Goes Green
The brand's eco-friendly products are cheaper to make, but
its buyers are more interested in design and performance
than sustainability
By Reena Jana
The sole of Nike's (NKE) new Air Jordan is made with ground-
up bits of old Nike sneakers. But
the company isn't selling it as an eco-friendly shoe: That might
not be good for business.
Nike, which is No. 42 on BusinessWeek 's list of the top-
performing companies, has an unusual
problem. Like many companies, it is trying to make its supply
chain and products greener, which
brings obvious environmental benefits and, just as important
these days, financial ones, too. But
while executives at General Electric (GE) and Wal-Mart (WMT)
eagerly advertise the eco-
conscious changes they're making, those at Nike choose to play
down sustainability initiatives.
Nike customers buy shoes to make them feel fast, slick, and hip;
they don't care much about
11. being eco-chic. "Nike has always been about winning," says
Dean Crutchfield, an independent
branding consultant in New York. "How is sustainability
relevant to its brand?"
Nike came to this same conclusion after a less-than-successful
experiment a few years ago. The
company launched its first line of environmentally friendly
shoes, called "Considered," in 2005.
It had high hopes for a walking boot, made with brown hemp
fibers, that looked obviously
earthy. Critics called the $110 shoes "Air Hobbits" because of
their forest-dweller feel and took
Nike to task for a design that detracted from its high-tech
image. The boots didn't sell well, and
within a year were taken off the shelves.
The lesson for Nike was that its green innovations should
continue, but its customers shouldn't
be able to tell. "We want to do more and say less," is the way
Lorrie Vogel, who oversees Nike's
green business practices, puts it. The company also has to be
careful about promoting itself as
socially responsible because of its past use of sweatshop labor
in Asian factories.
The sustainability push comes at a time when Chief Executive
Mark G. Parker is also trying to
streamline operations. The financial imperative to do so has
never been clearer: Nike's revenues
fell by 2%, to $4.4 billion, during its most recent quarter, which
ended Feb. 28. In May it laid off
5% of its worldwide staff. The company doesn't give estimates
of how much it might save by
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13. manufacturing.
And what do you know? The Air Jordans continue to sell well,
recycled materials and all,
suggesting that customers are still happy with the shoe's
performance. Charles D. Denson, Nike
brand chief, says that during the company's most recent quarter
Air Jordan helped the basketball
shoe division achieve double-digit growth. Nike's lineup now
includes eco-friendly basketball,
football, soccer, tennis, and running shoes.
With Burt Helm
Jana is the Innovation Dept. editor for BusinessWeek.
mailto:[email protected]Nike Quietly Goes GreenThe brand's
eco-friendly products are cheaper to make, but its buyers are
more interested in design and performance than
sustainabilityPERFORMING WELL
BA 3102 Online
Reflection Paper #3 Instructions
Has the “Go Green,” environmental sustainability movement
changed your daily life (e.g., shopping habits, how you
commute or dispose of waste etc.)?
- If so, in what way? And why do you do these things? Would
any of the ethical theories discussed in the course (profit
maximization, utilitarianism, universalism) explain your
actions?
- If not, why not? Would any of the ethical theories (profit
maximization, utilitarianism, universalism) explain your actions
14. (or lack of action)?
Your paper should be one to two double spaced pages, using 1
inch margins and a normal sized font. Your reflection paper
will be graded on a pass/fail basis. To pass, you need to do a
reasonable job of explaining your answer and meet the page
requirement.
