Introduction
The Polaroid case lays emphasis on the significance of quality and process control measures. The materials represented majority (2/3) of the manufacturing cost at R2 plant. This fact only reflects that the quality control, yield minimization and maximization of scrap were fundamental at the plant and for the Polaroid as a whole. Unquestionably, the external failure costs, which include lost sales, product return, and customer complaints, and internal failure costs that include process failure and scrap network can extremely be significance in this industry (Wheelwright and Bowen 2002). By the year 1984, there was pressure to both limit and reduce the costs hence this gave rise to project Greenlight implementation.
The expensive materials actually represented around 2/3 of manufacturing cost at R2. The quality issues cost is just magnified because of nature of this specific manufacturing process and dollar value that is associated with the QC and scrap created. For instance, in the year 1984, the sampled scrap essentially accounted for 540,000 U.S dollars, operator sampled scrap extra 740,000 U.S dollars, and the rejected finished product an extra 2 million U.S dollars (Wheelwright and Bowen 2002) .
The results in this case truly showed a defect rate of ten times higher after the Greenlight Project, since they had risen from 1 percent to 10 percent. In addition, out of the 45 samples, 20 samples had a finger height, which was basically out of control. Its previous procedures were ineffective since they used to reject the samples that had surplus regents, when that did not affect the customer service. Furthermore, sampling was destroying the perfectly good products and producing excess scrap, whiles the process control could in real sense eliminate need for too much testing.
Bibliography
Wheelwright, S. C., & Bowen, H. K. (2002). Process control at Polaroid (A). Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School.
