Everyone who has faced a production problem with a need to solve the problem by using production data can relate to the notion of a brain teaser. The brain teasers presented here are based on real-world situations that are encountered by workers in manufacturing environments. The brain teasers have three parts: (1) the situation, (2) available data or other supporting information and (3) questions that various workers want answered for continual improvement. Recommended solutions follow in the next issue and on the Web at Quality Online (www.qualitymag.com).
Situation
Joanne is the production manager for a company that manufactures plastic containers. She has three production lines dedicated to one product, and she care-fully monitors the productivity of these lines. As part of a seminar on analyzing the variation in data, she put the productivity data for each line on a process behavior chart. Much to her surprise, Joanne discovered that the productivity of each line was predictable, although she was not impressed with the amount of variation, nor the overall average.