Mr. Patil said that the presentation will be from Industrial Relation Point of view. He said that for an employee the wages are decided by the settlement of the Union and Employer. So what monitory benefit he is going to have is already decided, how much he has to work is also decided. Then what is the motivation for him to involve in activities other than his regular work. This is where the HR role comes in to picture and Quality Circle is one such useful activity apart from suggestion scheme and team building. Mr. Patil further added that bringing four or five people on one platform for sharing their ideas themselves is very difficult. These people may be very good in their work but asking them to talk on a common platform is very difficult as they have never done it before. Mr. Patil was proud to tell that in his organization an operator who has only passed 10th standard with Marathi medium, by involving him in Quality Circle activity could finally give a fluent presentation in English on the work which he has done in QC. He believes that by involving workers in this activity, any thing is possible. He told that they started the presentation initially in Marathi in the factory, then in Hindi at national forum and finally in English at international forum. At Bangkok their presentation was judged as outstanding amongst the some presentations from Singapore, China etc. There was no award or any other monitory gain but making a presentation at international level was itself a motivation. While preparing for the presentation the team members used to work on weekly holiday as well as till late in the night.

Mr. Suresh Patil, Sr. Manager, Harita Seating Systems introduced the subject. He said the total presentation will be in three parts. A) What is Quality Circle? B) Which are the tools used in Quality Circle? C) Case study explaining how a problem related to a customer complement is solved. Harita Seating System is the manufacturer of Automobile seats and their parts. Their customers are Tata Motors, Mahindra and John Deer Tractors etc.

What is Quality Circle?

Quality Circle started way back in 1965 in Japan. Many companies like Telco, Thermax and Bajaj etc. in Pune have introduced this in their organization during 1980-85. With Quality Circle mainly we can achieve two things. One is Employee Involvement and second is Problem Solving. In this circle, a group of persons come to-gather to solve a problem at their work place.

Structure & Tools Used in Quality Circles

Mr. Kishan from Harita Seating System, explained the Structure and tools used in Quality Circle in their organization.
At the very beginning of QC, Mr. Kishan said that they gave Quality Circle Awareness Training to every employee of the company. The purpose is to understand what is QC? What are its benefits, what tools are used while working on it and how QC is to be implemented? They started this training activity at the operator level and then continued it for supervisors and others.
In Harita Seating Systems they have made a structure for this activity of Quality Circle. Each team consists of a Coordinator, a Facilitator and Team Members working in that area. Coordinator coordinates all the activities in which management decision is required or any help required from other departments etc. Facilitator sees that the progress of the team is as per schedule, the meeting are taking place regularly, there are no interpersonal problems within the team and if there are, they get sorted out. In short he sees that everything in a particular team is going smooth.
Each team is given a name like names of flowers, names of planets etc. As an example the team which gave presentation on that day was ‘Prajakta’. The team meets every week after working hours after the shift is over. No body is forced to participate in this work. It is completely voluntary.
Mr. Kishan further added that to begin with the team starts collecting the problems in their area of working. These problems are related to Productivity, Quality, Control (e.g. transport or packing etc.), Delivery, Safety etc. The Quality Circle Activity includes following.

1. Discovering or Identifying a problem
2. Organizing the information
3. Generating Ideas to solve the problem
4. Analyzing actions
5. Taking actions for effective improvement
6. Establishing control for sustained improvement

While working on Quality Circle following are the tools used as stated by Mr. Kishan.

1) Check Sheet:
Recording the collected data in a simple but effective method is called a check sheet. Check sheet depends on facts. By check sheet we can analyse the past and present situation. We can find out the cause and initiate countermeasures and control. Therefore a format is to be designed to suit each case. Check sheet is very important for further work and therefore following points are to be taken care of.

• Clearly identify the purpose of data collection
• Decide on how to gather data
• Decide on time period of the data collection
• Design a format which is clear and easy to understand
• Collect data consistently and honestly

2) Pareto:
Pareto analysis (sometimes referred to as the 80/20 rule and as ABC analysis) is a method of classifying items, events, or activities according to their relative importance.
A Pareto chart is used to graphically summarize and display the relative importance of the differences between groups of data.
The Pareto effect even operates in quality improvement: 80% of problems usually stem from 20% of the causes. Pareto charts are used to display the Pareto principle in action, arranging data so that the few vital factors that are causing most of the problems reveal themselves. Concentrating improvement efforts on these few will have a greater impact and be more cost-effective than undirected efforts.
The questions Pareto Analysis answers are

• What are the largest issues facing our team or business?
• What 20% of sources are causing 80% of the problems (80/20 Rule)?
• Where should we focus our efforts to achieve the greatest improvements?

3) Brain Storming:
It is a technique to obtain creative ideas by a group of persons involved in some activity within a shortest possible time. Brainstorming is a lateral thinking process. It asks that people come up with ideas and thoughts that seem at first to be a bit shocking or crazy. You can then change and improve them into ideas that are useful, and often original and very attractive.
The QC team meets for ½ or 1 hour and start giving ideas about the problem at hand. Define the problem clearly which you want to solve. Keep the session focused on the problem. Leader has to note down all the ideas. He should not only allow all the persons in the team to talk but also encourage them to give ideas even if they seem to be wild at this point of time. Therefore leader has to really lead the team to generate many ideas.
During brainstorming sessions there should therefore be no criticism of ideas: You are trying to open up possibilities and break down wrong assumptions about the limits of the problem. Judgments and analysis at this stage will stop idea generation.

4) Cause & Effect Diagram:

The cause-and-effect diagram is also called the Ishikawa diagram (after its creator, Kaoru Ishikawa of Japan), or the fishbone diagram (due to its shape).
An example of Cause and Effect Diagram is shown above. This diagram is created so that all possible causes of a result could be listed in such a way as to allow a user to graphically show these possible causes. From this diagram, the user can define the most likely causes of a result. As shown above the causes for the particular problem pertaining to all 4M (Man, Machine, Material and Method or Process) are shown against each category.
The diagrams are drawn for different level. 1st level diagram is drawn immediately after brain storming and all the causes listed in the brain storming are shown in this diagram. After discussing in detail in team meetings some of the causes are eliminated in level 2 or 3, till we conclude for the related causes for the problem. Here we need to do the ‘Gamba’ analysis, which is nothing but visiting the actual workplace and analysing it by thorough observation. Once we arrive at conclusion for the causes we can mark them and then can take action to eliminate the same.

5) Histogram:

A histogram is used to graphically summarize and display the distribution of a process data set. In plotting a histogram, one starts by dividing the range of all values into non-overlapping intervals, called class intervals, in such a way that every piece of data is contained in some class interval
A histogram is "a representation of a frequency distribution by means of rectangles whose widths represent class intervals and whose areas are proportional to the corresponding frequencies."
The strength of a histogram is that it provides an easy-to-read picture of the location and variation in a data set. Histogram is used in QC for checking the process. If we mark the upper and lower limits of the tolerance to be achieved we can find whether our process is capable or not. If maximum number of observations are at the middle of the tolerances that is at the mean of higher and lower limit then our process is capable. Action is required to be taken to bring the process to the mean if it is not.
In addition to these 4 tools Mr. Kishan also discussed in brief the following tools used for QC activity.

• Graphs : Line graph, Bar Graph, Pie Graph and Radar graph
• Control Charts

After this, team members of the team which was judged outstanding at international convention Bangkok, presented a case study of their work done as a Quality Circle.

CASE STUDY

A team for Quality Circle from production operators was formed on 21st Nov 1998. The team was named as ‘Prajakta’. The supervisor of their section was coordinator of the team and a facilitator was also identified for the team. The team members worked on a problem of customer rejection and they completely solved the problem. They all participated voluntarily and were working after their regular working hours.

a) Problem Identification:
There was a list of 90 problems in the production area. The problems were grouped in A, B, C category.
‘A’ category means problems which can be solved within the department. ‘B’ category means for solving those problems help of other departments is required. ‘C’ category means those problems for which management permission and guidance is required.
‘A’ category problems were further divided in to three groups. They are Productivity related, Quality related and Customer related. They found that customer related problems were in maximum number. These problems were further divided as Critical, Major and Minor. After going through all the problems they identified that rejection of John Deer Tractor seat was very high and critical. Therefore Prajakta team decided to solve this problem by Quality Circle technique. The team found that two types of rejection.

1. While adjusting the seat forward and backward by sliding mechanism to suit the driver’s height the seat was not getting locked properly.
2. The pin which was used to locate and lock the seat in position was rubbing against the bracket and was getting worn out or damaged.

b) Brainstorming:
After studying the problem they conducted a brainstorming session of the team members and listed out the possible causes for the problem. And then the causes were categorised in to 4M as mentioned above. After again discussing it further they came to conclusion that the problem arises due to problems in Spring, Bush, Pin and the Lever in the sliding mechanism. The parts of sliding mechanism were checked for the dimensions as per the drawing, they found that there were some errors. The rejection was 12380 PPM.

c) Root Cause & Counter measures:
Then by ‘Why-Why’ analysis they found the root cause for these dimensional errors. They had to work with the suppliers of these parts to get these parts defect free. For this they had to do some changes in tools, jigs and fixtures. With this the rejection was totally eliminated and the problem in the sliding mechanism was solved. After trials at customer end they found that spring used to engage pin, gets loose and after some use the force gets reduced. They took this problem to their R & D department. They designed a new spring and the problem is now totally eliminated.

d) Standardization:
After they confirmed the results they standardized it and recorded the entire actions so that the same problem should not arise in any other seat. They conduct the audit at every three months to check the whether the rejection is not increased.

e) Benefits:
According to the team members they got benefited as follows.

• They understood how to work in team and solve the problems systematically.
• They are now bold to talk in front of audience
• Their confidence is increased considerably for solving any problem.

Future Plans: The team has taken further project to reduce the rejection of the same seat due to other problems. The rejection which is reduced from 12380 to1547 PPM due to QC, will further be reduced because of next project.