A company is looking at improve its output of products that are accepted by its customers, hence raising the quality of its products. A question has been asked related to this though. “If line employees are required to work on quality improvement activities, the company’s long-term productivity will suffer.” Discuss this from a company perspective addressing the impact of the long-term consequences of this statement on both company production and company productivity. Consider as an example of line employees those employees working on an assembly line.

Answer:

The line or assembly line employees work performs the same kind of tasks repeatedly. They are not involved in productivity such as reducing the cycle time, increasing up time, etc. They main focus is to fit the parts as they have been trained. For example, in an auto-making company, the assembly line workers perform the tasks of aligning the vehicle parts. However, if they are involved in quality improvement activities such as identification and elimination of waste/defects, then it is most likely to affect the productivity of the employees. This eventually would result in reduced production level at the plant. Hence, quality improvement activities need to be undertaken by Quality Improvement Managers or Supervisors to ensure that the production and productivity is not interrupted at the same time continuous improvement of quality is always maintained.