Problem IdentificationThe most important issue is about management. The senior management is not really serious about implementing the quality changes that the company needs. Despite the fact that they have recently asked Hank Colb to improve their quality program, there is still a lack of quality because of the non-efficient senior management support.The company wants to give more importance to schedule and maintaining market share than ensuring quality to customer. This results in poor attitude towards quality in the entire organization. We think that here the quality is considered something that would be an add-on which sometimes hinder the job at hand. Also there is no proper training before starting any job. This results in underqualified people doing the job. This major problem created several other problems such as lack of purchasing, design, testing processes, and inspections. It also created a lack of product tractability and maintenance records of equipments. Also the design changes are done without any scientific basis.

What should Hank do?He should talk with the senior management to enlist their support for quality improvements in the company. After that he should start a program that is directed towards building awareness amoung the people about the real cost of maintaining poor quality standards and the merits of superior quality processes. In the short run he should focus on getting things under his control. This can be by collecting information on why the problems like machine breakdown keep occurring.After this he should engage senior management in implementing a good quality system like the ISO 9000 for design, purchasing, testing etc.