Ruzzakiah Jenal

Quality Control Implementation in Manufacturing Companies: Motivating Factors and Challenges

The pressure from globalisation has made manufacturing organisations moving towards three major competitive arenas: quality, cost, and responsiveness. Quality is a universal value and has became a global issue. In order to survive and be able to provide customers with good products, manufacturing organisations are required to ensure that their processes are continuously monitored and product quality are improved. Manufacturing organisation applies various quality control techniques to improve the quality of the process by reducing its variability. A range of techniques are available to control product or process quality. These include seven statistical process control (SPC) tools, acceptance sampling, quality function deployment (QFD), failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), six sigma, and design of experiments (DoE). The purpose of this chapter is to present the implementation of quality control in four manufacturing companies and identify the factors that influence the selection of quality control techniques in these companies. The paper discusses the reasons for applying quality control techniques, the techniques used, and problems faced by them during the implementation. The paper begins with an overview of quality control and its implementation in organisations. This is followed by the description of four selected companies in this study including their products and company backgrounds. The application of quality control in each company is then presented. The motivating factors for the companies to apply quality control and challenges faced by companies in implementing quality control are discussed.

Determinant Factors of Customer Satisfaction for E-Hailing Service: A Preliminary Study

E-hailing is an online transportation service that has emerged as the passengers’ favourite in transportation industry that involves interaction between customers and service provider. However, as customers in this era have more information and choice to choose any facilities, the service provider needs to satisfy and provide better service to their large number of customers especially for e-hailing service. Maintaining customer satisfaction is crucial for e-hailing’s service provider to sustain competitive advantages. Company-customer interaction is one of the definitions for value co-creation. Consequently, value co-creation approach has been used to increase customer satisfaction as the customers take part in creating the experiences and contribute value-in-context that will improve company’s performance. Therefore, this study aims to determine technological factors that influence customer satisfaction for e-hailing service by embedding value co-creation elements. Using design science research in information system methodology, the factors of customer satisfaction for e-hailing service are identified and classified based on outline of the study phases in sequences. In this paper, the components of value co-creation will be embedded by comparing the similarities between value co-creation model and existing customer satisfaction models from past researchers.

Master plan nurse duty roster using the 0-1 goal programming technique

The scheduling of nurses is particularly challenging because of the nature of the work which is around the clock. In addition, inefficient duty roster can have an effect on the nurses well being as well as their job satisfaction. In nurse scheduling problem (NSP), nurses are generally allocated to periods of work over a specified time horizon. A typical length of the schedule varies from a few weeks to a month. The schedule will be consistently rebuilt after the specified time period and will result in a time-consuming task for the administrative staff involved. Moreover, the task becomes overwhelming when the staff needs to consider the previous duty rosters in order to maintain the quality of schedules. Therefore, this study suggests the development of a master plan for a nurse duty roster for approximately one year. The master plan starts with the development of a blue print for the nurse duty roster using a 0-1 goal programming technique. The appropriate working period for this blue print is formulate...