What’s going wrong at our model car factory?

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Preliminary remarks
The manufacturer discussed here and the errors that have occurred are a simplified representation. It is a purely fictitious manufacturer and factory.
Any similarities with real-life processes are purely coincidental. Any deviations from real process flows and production techniques are intentional,
in order to be able to focus on detecting defects.

The factory produces model cars that are sold as toys to dealers. The manufacturing process in the factory consists of six
processing steps:

Frequent complaints
Recently, the number of complaints the manufacturer has received has been growing. Dealers are returning cars because
they are faulty. The reasons for these complaints should be systematically investigated. To that end, complaints received
in the last four weeks have already been collected together.

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What’s going wrong at our model car factory?
Defect complaints received
The defects that have occurred and that have been complained about in the last four weeks have been noted. The following
picture has emerged:
·· 2 cars are missing at least one wheel
·· Wheels are not properly aligned on 40 cars
·· 10 cars are a color different to the color ordered
·· 45 cars have paint tears
·· 9 windows are damaged, of which 3 are cracked, 4 tight and 2 have color stains
·· The interior of 1 car has fallen out
·· 5 cars have cracks in the body

Wrong axle lengths

It was already noticeable that the car wheels were not positioned properly, but were either set too far under the body or
protruded from the body too much.
The model car wheels are correctly positioned if the length of the axles is between 4.18 and 4.22 cm.
The axles of the model cars are made of thin metal rods, which are cut to the required length by machine. It is obvious that
the axles are sometimes too long or too short.
To get to the bottom of the defects, the length of the metal rods was measured for 28 days after they had been cut by the
machine. Twice a day, at 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., the length of three axles was measured. From the three measured values
the arithmetic mean (average) was calculated and entered in a worksheet.
The measured values can be found in the histogram and control chart Excel worksheets.

Paint tears
The bodies of many model cars had paint tears. Paint tears occur when too much paint is applied or when the paint is
applied unevenly. It is obvious that the best place to look for the cause of this problem is where the paint is applied to the
car body: in the spray booth.
The background to this is that if the temperature in the spray booth is wrong during paint spraying, the paint sets in an
uncontrolled way. The paint mixture contains chemical agents that depending on the temperature, among other things, set
the paint and cause it to harden.
In this regard, a measurement series has already been carried out in the spray booth to investigate the relationship bet-
ween the temperature and the frequency of paint tears.
An additional measurement series was carried out at a constant temperature of 21.5°C to determine the number of paint
tears depending upon the solvent concentration in the paint mixture.
The optimum temperature for painting is between 21 and 22°C.
The measured values can be found in the scatter plot Excel worksheet.

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