Marcelo Pancotto
DBA in Technology and Operations Management
Dissertation Chair: Prof. K. Bowen
Underlying Dynamics of Organizational Learning from a Problem Solving Perspective: Quality Improvement Efforts and Problem Population Dynamics
The literature on organizational learning curves has established that plants improve their performance at very different rates of learning. Several empirical studies have identified some of the factors affecting productivity improvement with cumulative experience. Most of these empirical studies on organizational learning curves have focused on productivity improvement, with the plant as the unit of analysis. However, few empirical studies have focused on quality improvement learning curves, and to our knowledge, no study has analyzed disaggregated intra-plant quality problems as the unit of empirical analysis.
This dissertation examines quality improvement within 17 large manufacturing assembly plants within one company which set company-wide quality improvement objectives. Combining field observations with statistical analysis on panel data with intra-plant micro-data on quality faults along the production process, we were able to deconstruct elements of the "learning black-box," to understand how, and under what circumstances, different production areas within each plant were able improve their quality performance.
In this dissertation we arrived to the following three main conclusions:
1. The problem population within a complex manufacturing process under competitive pressure to improve quality performance (at an aggregated level) is characterized by a large number of problem categories and low rate of defect creation within each problem category. Under these circumstances, problem population diversity tends to be high, and the higher it becomes, the more it hampers organizational learning. Organizations attempting to fuel their learning through root cause problem solving need to develop robust and relatively decentralized, low cost root cause problem solving capabilities.
2. Management at the plants was usually biased toward framing the "organizational quality problem" in terms of the aggregated quality defect rate, rather than in terms of the disaggregated defect rates by quality problem category. This framing of the "organizational quality problem" seems to have biased quality improvement resource allocation toward "containment countermeasures," with little resources allocated to follow up containment with root cause problem solving.
3. Some "lean manufacturing system" techniques may improve quality fault feedback, increase organizational responsiveness to quality faults and provide the opportunity to begin root cause problem solving in the context of the problem. However, if the organizations do not develop decentralized root cause problem solving capabilities, those lean manufacturing techniques may result in a "containing organization," instead of supporting a "learning organization."
