The Concept of Quality Practice Questions

Item A: Brindlow Scooters Ltd

Brindlow Scooters Ltd is a private limited company based in Sheffield. It makes children's scooters which it sells to toy and sports retailers across the UK for £65 each. The business employs 70 people and uses flow production, with each employee completing one task on the production line.

Quality is checked by four inspectors who test every scooter at the end of the line. Scooters that fail the test are taken off the line and repaired at an average cost of £18 each. Brindlow Scooters Ltd gives retailers a full refund for any scooter returned by a customer within the first year. Retailers have started to complain about the number of returns and a review website now rates the scooters 2.9 out of 5.

Table 1 Production and quality data for Brindlow Scooters Ltd

	2023	2024
Scooters produced	42 000	48 000
Scooters failing the final inspection	2 100	2 880
Cost of repairing each failed scooter	£18	£18
Scooters returned by customers	900	1 200

Item B: Brindlow Scooters Ltd

The operations director wants to remove the final inspection and introduce total quality management (TQM). Every employee would be trained to check their own work and the work passed on to them, and to stop the line as soon as a fault is found. Training would cost £40 000 in the first year. The four inspectors, who each earn £27 000 a year, would be moved to other jobs in the business rather than made redundant. Some employees have said they do not want extra responsibility without extra pay. One large retailer has warned that it will stop stocking Brindlow's scooters unless the number of returns falls.

Item A: Hartsmere Furniture Ltd

Hartsmere Furniture Ltd is a private limited company in Shrewsbury which makes handmade oak dining tables. It employs 42 people, 36 of whom work in production. A table passes through five stages: cutting, shaping, assembly, sanding and finishing.

Tables are sold to furniture retailers for an average of £680 each. Hartsmere Furniture Ltd advertises its tables as 'built to last a lifetime' and gives customers a 10-year guarantee.

Quality is checked by one quality inspector, who examines every table at the end of the production process. Any table that fails the check is stripped down and re-made using new oak. Some faults are only noticed by the retailer or the customer after delivery.

Table 1 Quality information for Hartsmere Furniture Ltd, 2024

Item	Figure
Tables completed	2 400
Tables returned by customers as faulty	96
Average cost of replacing one faulty table	£320
Annual cost of employing the quality inspector	£28 000

Item B: Hartsmere Furniture Ltd

The directors are considering introducing total quality management (TQM). Every production employee would check their own work and the work of the stage before, and no table would move on until any fault had been put right. Training all 36 production employees would cost £18 000 and each employee would lose two days of production time. The quality inspector's job would no longer be needed.

Production employees are paid a bonus for every table they complete. Some have said that checking the previous stage will slow them down. Lowfield Interiors, the retailer that buys one third of Hartsmere Furniture Ltd's tables, has said it will only continue to order if the number of faulty deliveries falls.

Item A: Calvera Lighting plc

Calvera Lighting plc designs and manufactures LED light fittings. It has factories in Porto, Portugal and in Hai Phong, Vietnam, and employs 2 400 people. Calvera uses flow production to make 200 000 fittings each month, all of which are sold to electrical retailers and builders' merchants in 30 countries at an average price of £18 each.

At the end of each production line a team of 15 inspectors gives every finished fitting a visual check before it is packed. Despite this, 6% of the fittings sold last year were returned as faulty. Engineers found that most failures were caused by a loose wiring connection made early in the assembly process, which cannot be seen once the fitting has been assembled. Calvera replaces every returned fitting free of charge, at a cost of £11 each.

The operations director, Tomas Reis, is considering introducing total quality management (TQM). Every employee would be responsible for quality and would check their own work at each stage of assembly, instead of relying on the inspectors at the end. Training all production staff would cost £350 000.