This issue contains three papers and a case study on varied topics like lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, sourcing and business process management. The first paper, “Scrap Reduction in a Piston Manufacturing Industry: An Analysis Using Six Sigma and DMAIC Methodology”, by Dhiraj Kumar and Deepak Kaushish, presents an empirical application of Six Sigma and DMAIC to reduce product scrap for a piston manufacturing organization. The paper follows the DMAIC methodology to investigate defects and root causes, and provide a solution to reduce/eliminate these defects. The analysis employing Six Sigma and DMAIC indicated that the design of casting spoon and its material influenced the amount of defective piston produced. In particular, the why-why analysis and two sample t-Test were combined to statistically determine the correlation of the casting spoon design and its material with defects as well as to define their optimum values needed to reduce/eliminate the defects. As a result, a reduction of scrap percentage from 9.9% to 5% was achieved, which helped the organization to reduce its Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO) from 99,000 to 50,000 and thus improve its Sigma level from 2.86 to 3.2.

The second paper, “Implementation of Lean Manufacturing in a Small-Scale Industry”, by Pardeep Kumar and Sanjay Kajal, uses 5S tool for analysis in the rice mill industry situated in Kurukshetra, Haryana. The researchers calculated 5S weekly appraisal scores using 5S audit sheets.

The third paper, “The Functional Integration of Operations Management in Banks: A Framework for Research”, by Thomas Ilin, presents a general review, discussion and empirical analysis of relevant academic literature on cross-functional integration from the Service Operations Management (SOM) and Service Management (SM) domains, together with a proposed framework for use in further research. Empirical analysis of literature themes by industry, content analysis of key papers exploring their usage of the term ‘function’, and critical analysis of the literature from a new 'functionalist' perspective are given.

The case study, “Apple and Conflict Minerals: Ethical Sourcing for Sustainability”, by Debapratim Purkayastha and Adapa Srinivasa Rao, speaks of sustainability issues of Apple’s sourcing from Asia. Since the Asian manufacturers were not too particular about checking the origins of the minerals they used, Apple had to face accusations by activists that it was using conflict minerals in its products. These conflict minerals led to the abuse of human rights in the strife-torn parts of the world. Extraction and sale of conflict minerals like tin, tungsten, and tantalum from illegal mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo) and surrounding countries funded armed militia who fought against the government and violated the human rights of people living in the conflict-prone areas. The problem for Apple was compounded by the fact that the supply chain for such minerals was opaque and it was not so easy to determine which refiners and smelters around the world were financially fueling violence in the war-torn regions. There was also the possibility that such minerals could slip into its supply chain through indirect routes. The study deals with various issues before the management that need serious thought.

-- Anupam Ghosh
Consulting Editor