The effect a quality culture has on product quality in a production environment

Abstract

For a manufacturing organisation to be sustainable and grow, it needs to produce a product that is required by the market. The more products it can sell to the market the better. Thus, the more productive a manufacturing organisation can be, the better its chance to be sustainable. This is however not the full picture, even though productivity brings in revenue for the organisation, quality issues on produced products may take chunks out of the said revenue (Kafetzopoulos et al., 2015:393-394; Prístavka et al., 2016; Sreedharan et al., 2017:361-362). Therefore, the more quality issues reported, the lower the chances of being sustainable become (Esa & Yusof, 2017:400; Sreedharan et al., 2017:361-362). The research question was developed from the principles discussed above, stating does a work culture, driven by quality, could have a positive outcome within a manufacturing organisation? The research utilised a quantitative research methodology to provide an answer to the stated research question. The study was conducted on a single organisation with two different manufacturing factories. Each factory was pinpointed to have its own form of work-culture, which had to be identified. It was discovered that the Cape Town factory had developed a quality-driven culture, compared to the Johannesburg factory’s production-driven culture. These claims were tested to determine whether it was true. The results were partially confirmed, as both factories had tendencies towards the claimed work cultures, but did not fully conform to the literature stated values of the given cultures. The study did establish that the factory that had the tendency towards a quality-driven culture had the best overall quality record of the two factories. It had the lowest amount of financial impact on the organisation due to less reported quality issues. It was also noted, even though the data only represented a three-year period, that the factory with the tendency towards a quality-driven culture had the highest levels of productivity, for this study.