OM Exam 2 Ch 6 and 6s
A Three Sigma program has how many defects per million?
2700
If 1 million passengers pass through the St. Louis Airport with checked baggage each month, a successful Six Sigma program for baggage handling would result in how many passengers with misplaced luggage?
3.4
Companies with the highest levels of quality are how many times more productive than their competitors with the lowest quality levels?
5
Techniques for building employee empowerment include:
All of these are techniques for employee empowerment.
Acceptance sampling:
All of these are true.
An x-bar control chart was examined and no data points fell outside of the limits. Can this process be considered in control?
Both Not yet, there could be a pattern to the points and Not yet, the R-chart must be checked
The process capability measures Cp and Cpk differ because:
Both only one ensures the process mean is centered within the limits and Cp values for a given process will always be greater than or equal to Cpk values are correct.
Conforming to standards is the focus of the product-based definition of quality.
False
What is a set of quality standards developed by the International Organization for Standardization?
ISO 9000
Members of quality circles are:
None of these; all of the statements are false.
Which of the following is NOT one of the major categories of costs associated with quality?
None of these; they are all major categories of costs associated with quality.
The process improvement technique that sorts the vital few from the trivial many is:
Pareto analysis.
"Quality Is Free," meaning that the costs of poor quality have been understated, is the work of:
Philip B. Crosby.
PDCA, developed by Shewhart, stands for which of the following?
Plan-Do-Check-Act
Which of the following statements is NOT true?
Product liability transfers from the manufacturer to the retailer once the retailer accepts delivery of the product.
What is a popular measurement scale for service quality that compares service expectations with service performance?
SERVQUAL
Suppose that a firm has historically been achieving "Three Sigma" quality. If the firm later changes its quality management practices such that it begins to achieve "Six Sigma" quality, which of the following phenomena will result?
The average number of defects will be cut by 99.87%.
Arnold Palmer Hospital uses which of the following quality management techniques?
The hospital uses all of these techniques.
Which of the following statements regarding Arnold Palmer Hospital is FALSE?
The hospital's high quality is measured by low readmission rates, not patient satisfaction.
Which of the following statements regarding "Six Sigma" is TRUE?
The term has two distinct meanings-one is statistical; the other is a comprehensive quality system.
Which of the following is FALSE regarding control charts?
Values above the upper control limits imply that the product's quality is exceeding expectations.
"The employee cannot produce products that on average exceed the quality of what the process is capable of producing" expresses a basic philosophy in the writings of:
W. Edwards Deming.
A production manager at a pottery factory has noticed that about 70 percent of defects result from impurities in raw materials, 15 percent result from human error, 10 percent from machine malfunctions, and 5 percent from a variety of other causes. This manager is most likely using:
a Pareto chart
In his book, Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals, Dr. Peter Pronovost emphasizes the use of what tool to reduce catheter infections?
a checklist
Total quality management emphasizes:
a commitment to quality that goes beyond internal company issues to suppliers and customers.
"Quality lies in the eyes of the beholder" is:
a user-based definition of quality.
Which of the following is not a typical inspection point?
after a costly process
To become ISO 9000 certified, organizations must:
all of these
An acceptance sampling plan's ability to discriminate between low quality lots and high quality lots is described by:
an operating characteristic curve.
A successful quality strategy features which of the following elements?
an organizational culture that fosters quality, an understanding of the principles of quality, and engaging employees in the necessary activities to implement quality
Control charts for variables are based on data that come from:
averages of small samples.
What is the statistical process chart used to control the number of defects per unit of output?
c-chart
A customer service manager at a retail clothing store has collected numerous customer complaints from the forms they fill out on merchandise returns. To analyze trends or patterns in these returns, she has organized these complaints into a small number of sources or factors. This is most closely related to the ________ tool of TQM.
cause and effect diagram
A fishbone chart is also known as a:
cause-and-effect diagram.
A successful TQM program incorporates all EXCEPT which of the following?
centralized decision-making authority
The purpose of an x-bar chart is to determine whether there has been a:
change in the central tendency of the process output.
The c-chart signals whether there has been a:
change in the number of defects per unit.
A recent consumer survey conducted for a car dealership indicates that, when buying a car, customers are primarily concerned with the salesperson's ability to explain the car's features, the salesperson's friendliness, and the dealer's honesty. The dealership should be ESPECIALLY concerned with which determinants of service quality?
communication, courtesy, and credibility
The philosophy of zero defects is:
consistent with the commitment to continuous improvement.
PDCA is most often applied with regard to which aspect of TQM?
continuous improvement
GE's recall of 3.1 million dishwashers cost the company more in repairs than the value of the actual dishwashers. This is an example of which quality principle?
cost of poor quality is underestimated
Which of the determinants of service quality involves having the customer's best interests at heart?
credibility
The goal of inspection is to:
detect a bad process immediately
Regarding the quality of design, production, and distribution of products, an ethical requirement for management is to:
determine whether any of the organization's stakeholders are being wronged by poor quality products.
Building high-morale organizations and building communication networks that include employees are both elements of:
employee empowerment
One of Britain's largest children's hospitals working with a Ferrari racing team is an example of:
external benchmarking
Which of the four major categories of quality costs is particularly hard to quantify?
external failure costs
"Making it right the first time" is the focus of the user-based definition of quality.
false
A normal distribution is generally described by its two parameters: the mean and the range.
false
An improvement in quality must necessarily increase costs.
false
Benchmarking requires the comparison of your firm to other organizations; it is not appropriate to benchmark by comparing one of your divisions to another of your divisions.
false
Deming's writings on quality tend to focus on the customer and on fitness for use, unlike Juran's work that is oriented toward meeting specifications.
false
Managers at Arnold Palmer Hospital take quality so seriously that the hospital typically is a national leader in several quality areas-so that continuous improvement is no longer necessary.
false
Of the several determinants of service quality, access is the one that relates to keeping customers informed in language they can understand.
false
Quality is mostly the business of the quality control staff, not ordinary employees.
false
Source inspection is inferior to inspection before costly operations.
false
The Japanese use the term poka-yoke to refer to continuous improvement.
false
The purpose of process control is to detect when natural causes of variation are present.
false
The quality loss function indicates that costs related to poor quality are low as long as the product is within acceptable specification limits.
false
To measure the voltage of batteries, one would sample by attributes.
false
Quality can improve profitability by reducing costs. Which of the following is not an aspect of reduced costs by quality improvements?
flexible pricing
Among the tools of TQM, the tool ordinarily used to aid in understanding the sequence of events through which a product travels is a:
flowchart
Poka-yoke is the Japanese term for:
foolproof
When sample measurements falls inside the control limits, it means that:
if there is no other pattern in the samples, the process is in control.
A hospital benchmarked against a Ferrari racing team in an effort to:
improve patient handoff quality.
A quality circle holds a brainstorming session and attempts to identify the factors responsible for flaws in a product. Which tool do you suggest they use to organize their findings?
ishikawa diagram
The "four Ms" of cause-and-effect diagrams are:
material, machinery/equipment, manpower, and methods.
A good description of source inspection is inspecting:
one's own work
Pareto charts are used to:
organize errors, problems, or defects.
If a sample of parts is measured and the mean of the measurements is outside the control limits, the process is:
out of control and the process should be investigated for assignable variation.
A checklist is a type of:
poka-yoke
What shape does the quality loss function exhibit?
quadratic
According to the manufacturing-based definition of quality:
quality is the degree to which a specific product conforms to standards.
Costs of dissatisfaction, repair costs, and decreased future demand are elements of cost in the:
quality loss function.
Which of the determinants of service quality involves performing the service right the first time?
reliability
What refers to training and empowering frontline workers to solve a problem immediately?
service recovery
A manager tells her production employees, "It's no longer good enough that your work falls anywhere within the specification limits. I need your work to be as close to the target value as possible." Her thinking is reflective of:
taguchi concepts
Marketing issues such as advertising, image, and promotion are important to quality because:
the intangible attributes of a product (including any accompanying service) may not be defined by the consumer.
Demand for a given item is said to be dependent if:
there is a clearly identifiable parent.
A run test is used:
to examine points in a control chart to check for nonrandom variability.
Based on his 14 Points, Deming is a strong proponent of:
training and knowledge
A c-chart is appropriate to plot the number of flaws in a bolt of fabric.
true
A cause-and-effect diagram helps identify the sources of a problem.
true
A checklist is a type of poka-yoke to help ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a task.
true
An acceptance sampling plan must define "good lots" and "bad lots" and specify the risk level associated with each one.
true
Averages of small samples, not individual measurements, are generally used in statistical process control.
true
Continuous improvement is based on the philosophy that any aspect of an operation can be improved.
true
Improved quality can increase profitability via allowing flexible pricing.
true
In acceptance sampling, a manager can reach the wrong conclusion if the sample is not representative of the population it was drawn from.
true
Internal failure costs are associated with scrap, rework, and downtime.
true
Kaizen is similar to TQM in that both are focused on continuous improvement.
true
Line employees need the knowledge of TQM tools.
true
Mean charts and range charts complement one another, one detecting shifts in process average, the other detecting shifts in process dispersion.
true
One of the ways that just-in-time (or JIT) influences quality is that by reducing inventory, bad quality is exposed.
true
Philip Crosby is credited with both of these quality catch-phrases: "quality is free" and "zero defects."
true
Quality circles empower employees to improve productivity by finding solutions to work-related problems in their work area.
true
Some degree of variability is present in almost all processes.
true
TQM is important because each of the ten decisions made by operations managers deals with some aspect of identifying and meeting customer expectations.
true
The higher the process capability ratio, the greater the likelihood that process will be within design specifications.
true
Three broad categories of definitions of quality are:
user based, manufacturing based, and product based.
