Daniel Lau, a third-year undergraduate business student majoring in operations management at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology: Six Sigma Quality in the Making Case Study, HBS, Ireland

Daniel Lau, a third-year undergraduate business student majoring in operations management at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, joined Germanic Biochemical Technology (GBT) in the summer of 2021 as an intern. When he showed up to work on the first day, he was greeted by John Chan, the operations manager. To help Daniel become familiar with the production environment at GBT, John decided to give him a quick tour of the plant. Knowing Daniel’s background in operations management, John was happy to have Daniel as an intern and was interested to find out what contribution Daniel could make over the next few months.

As they walked by the packaging area of Germagic 4H Hand Sanitizer, one of GBT’s most popular products, John showed Daniel the automatic filling equipment that the company had just purchased a few months earlier. Although the new equipment was a big improvement over the semi-manual filling process used in the past, John lamented how many more resources were still needed to make sure the equipment was filling the right amount of hand sanitizer into the plastic bottles.

The production was usually done in batches of 1,000 bottles at a time. After the bottles were filled, workers would randomly check a few bottles (no more than 10 at a time, depending on the time available) from each batch of products to make sure they were within the product specifications, i.e., 500 ± 10 ml. If the workers found any of the bottles they sampled with less than 490 ml, they would alert their line supervisor, who would then stop the production to examine the equipment for possible malfunctioning.

By design, the plastic bottle could hold up to 510 ml of hand sanitizer. In case there was an overfilling problem, it would be readily visible to the workers, as the excess would spill out of the plastic bottles. Again, the production line would be shut down immediately for cleaning up.

Seizing the opportunity, Daniel suggested to John that they should take the samples for checking during the production process and not wait until the entire batch of products was completed. The idea was to detect any potential filling issues and provide an early warning during the production process by using statistical process control (SPC) tools such as control charts. As the operations manager, John knew about these tools but had never before implemented them. Besides, he always wanted to develop a quality improvement program to help GBT achieve six sigma quality.

Unfortunately, he had been too busy managing the supply of materials and fulfilling the distributor’s orders during the COVID-19 pandemic and could not find an opportunity to do so. John now felt a bit of relief as he realized Daniel would be the best person he could count on to help move the six sigma quality initiative forward for GBT.