Case study of Cranston Nissan

Personnel

1. promised to call customer about the status of the job but never did.

2. caused customer to take several long trips to pick up the car without offering a loaner car.

3. delivered car to customer with service problem not corrected.

Shop

1. fixed one problem, but then created another.

2. gives body shop customer low priority in the repair shop.

3. could not repair car when promised.

Procedure

1. lacks coordination between departments.

2. has no one in charge, but rather, many employees are involved with the customer.

3. involves ordering needed parts late.

Product appearance

1. indicates that exterior parts are not replaced properly after job is completed.

2. reveals interior parts damaged by personnel.

3. shows car received a poor wash job.

This categorization can be represented by a cause-and-effect diagram. There are two primary causes for these problems. First, management has lost control of the very thing the company should excel in – customer service. No one is responsible for coordinating problems within two departments. Second, the company lacks a “quality culture”; employees should pride themselves in solving problems for the customer. An example of the lack of a quality culture is the actions of the employee who brought the car with obvious defects to the customer three times.

Question 2 what are the probable causes of so many mishaps

– Maybe somebody carelessly made mistake forgetting to recover the molding, breaking the rearview mirror of the car, or carelessly forgetting to recover it.

– The car had already used for long time, May be has some potential damages were not easy found out. The mechanical show the problems, maybe didn’t find out before.

– Maybe there were less of requirements for reporting each process. Such as the check and sign requirement before acceptance for both of parties, the condition reporting and servicing reporting, the report for customers’ information which also includes their requirements and complaints with time and event.

– There was less specification or standard designed to standardization each process or flows, resulted the services provided to customer were very unprofessional and brought lots of inconvenience for other’s job. Those specifications or standards including: the check and acceptance standard, repairing program standard, the customer service standard, the time standard for responding customer’s requirement and solving their problems.

– Maybe there was less motivation of the shop for staff. Thus they were bad serving and working attitude for customers that was slouching, no-zealous, serious attitude.

– Maybe there was less monitor for their work, such as from their supervisors’ scout, the duty manager, the videos.

– Maybe the workers improperly operating that didn’t follow the standard for each working process or flow, due to they less necessary knowledge or skill, resulted in those mishaps happening. They might wrong shifted the car or wrong treat with the wire when searing for the other problem of the car, and not good handle the wire resulting the speedometer could not work well.

– Maybe they considered it was unnecessary to plan shift for labor holiday adding the double cost to pay workforce’s overtime.

– Maybe the shop believed “no-stocking” is benefit for saving cost to store and reducing the risk for overstock for some not often consumed components. Thus they preferred according to the order of customer to prepare those kinds of component.

Question 3 Prepare a cause- and – effect chart for “failure to remedy repair problem to customer satisfaction”.

[The chart see the appendix]

There are four major problems were identified.

The personnel

a) They didn’t care about the customer’s feeling; nonstandard services skill and careless and easygoing attitudes, lacking time consciousness to work which could not provide good services to customers. It always Sam making Call for the body shop, rather than the shop actively communicate with customer first to get any agreement for change, emerged lots of misunderstand and conflict between the shop and the customer.

b) They were less training to improve their service consciousness and skill, professional skill, team working spirit to collaborate and working process knowledge, working standard.

c) The workers had bad working skill and substandard operating that made lots of mistake during their work processes rather than limited customer’s damage.

d) The personnel are also lack team working spirit. They are less coordination with each other and among different department. It leads to separate department’s works and information didn’t link with other department very well which led to different decisions made for Sam’s charge.

e) They lack authority to make decision by themselves. Such as the service personnel didn’t have the authorization to decide the charge on spot.

The processes

a) Lack check and acceptance process to prevent problem in advance and commitment pushed.

b) There were no-stocking for the molding to provide customer’s need in time.

c) The shop no arranging shift on the labor holiday and not enough stock of components, reducing its capability to treat with urgency and during holiday, resulted Sam didn’t be resolved his problem car timely.

d) Unclear charge standard for personnel and customer, leading to sometime appear optionally charging with customer, making misconstruction for the charges list among customer and workers.

e) Order & Outsourcing process for the molding component wasted Sam’s time to wait.

f) Lack reports for each processes such the working condition report for car, the repairing report, the recheck and acceptance report, the customer information report.

g) It is unclear duty and responsibility assigned to each individual and department which caused to hardly find the duty people while mistakes were appearing or accident was happening.

The system

a) They lacked expertise to support to solve the customer’s problem soon and well, even brought more troubles for customer.

b) Lack standard and requirement followed for personnel handling each process.

The Materials

Short for wire led to the damages of courtesy light, Speedometer, Security system; And the damage for the Molding. Broke down and no-restituted for the rearview mirror was caused by somebody of the shop.

Question 4 What specific actions should Jackson take immediately? What should some of his longer-term goals be?

The immediate actions should be taken by Jackson are:

a) Complete the motivation system, such as increasing the salary level, rewarding good performance individual and team, adding the overtime compensation and for those bad performance staff, give appropriate punishment even fire, based on the fair and comprehensive performance measure standard. This process is in order to ensure the best workforce in the organization and contributing their work, to well supporting the organization to provide good products and service for customer.

b) Adopt questionnaire among staff and interview them regularly to momentarily find out the actually problems for them in their jobs, their
complaint or their suggestion.

c) Immediately recover the damage of broken rearview, even provide Sam some free services to remedy his damages caused by the body work and apologize for them, such as free clearing service, no charge for remedying the security system or free working condition check.

d) Provide training for staffs regularly. Training should include learning professional knowledge and skill, service skill, deal with urgency capability, team spirit, these performance’s standard specifications learning, equipments operating skill. Through continues training to improve their capability for providing a good quality of work or service quality to customer and increase their working efficiency to achieve continues improvement.

e) Adding some necessary equipment to facilitate working’s efficiency and quality.

f) Using just-in-time system to control the quality of the stock of materials, input and components, and responding customer’s requirement preventing and reducing defects timely.

g) Identify the defects in the work process and find out their sources and reasons by using statistical procedures or flexible manufacturing technique, and correct them in time.

h) Perfect the performance measure. Aspects measured includes the supervisors’ evaluation, customer’s satisfaction feedback, attendance report, daily working check, mistake report, peer’s feedback and so on.

i) Draw performance standard specification of each working program for workers, such as for interviewing customer program, entering service report process, receiving customer’s complaint process, cleaning process, checking mechanical working condition process, repairing process, and so on. Along with matching the customer’s expectation, use “six sigma” to ensure all processes achieving high quality being a long term.

In order to ensure all of these process adopting well in long term, Jackson still do these action:

a) Adopt flexible processes which would suit to match continually changing conditions and easy for adjusting. It would ensure the communication among each department and individuals are flowing.

b) Strengthen control by building control system, which is included: feed forward control, concurrent and urgency control, feedback control to ensure the organization would achieve superior efficiency and good responsiveness providing high quality to customers.

c) Keep the organization to be decentralization, flow, limited work specialization structure and using cross-functional teams to organize staff, in order to give staff enough authority and means implementing process improvements.

d) Providing employees with training in problem solving, decision making, negotiation, and team building to make sure they have capability to achieve their job well.

The longer-term goals for Jackson is completely and continually implement TQM, to achieve six sigma’s requirement, to ensure his organization would provide high standard quality, speedy, dependable, flexibility, and best price product and service to customers matching or higher their expectation, achieve the organization’s continues improvement.

We should realize that there is an immediate as well as a long-run need for action.

a) Immediately, Jackson should ensure that the problem is resolved to the customer’s satisfaction. The employees involved should be apprised of the problem and assist in the solution. All defects in Monahan’s car should be fixed in short order, and any inconvenience to Monahan should be minimized.

b) In the long run, a reorganization might be appropriate with some changes in personnel. The department that first contacts the customer should be responsible until the job is complete. Employees should be trained in Total Quality Management, TQM, especially as it relates to customer services. It might be appropriate to institute cross-functional teams to identify areas for improvement and to suggest organizational changes. Given the current state of affairs, this may take quite a while at Cranston Nissan.

Reference:

http://www.intellipage.com/om/crns_cse.htm

http://itdc.im.cyut.edu.tw/~jerry/opim/ritzman/chap05.htm

http://itdc.im.cyut.edu.tw/~jerry/opim/ritzman/ch05Cas1.pdf