Current situation: Your company, which is a large distributor of medical supplies (injection syringe or Blood collection supplies), supplies these products to large public and private hospitals in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. Your company operates a large distribution centre (DC) in Riyadh and one storage facility in Jeddah. Currently, the quality function at your facilities are quite bad as there are no proper quality systems to control and ensure the quality of storing and delivering these products. Due to the perishable nature of your inventory and bad operational practices, product damage and quality issues are prevalent in your warehouse. All quality-related tasks are carried out by your warehouse operational staff who are not highly trained nor knowledgeable about quality management. There is no dedicated staff to perform the quality operations. Products are moved using manual staff and sometimes using a forklift between the storage shelves and delivery vehicles. Refrigeration sensors and storage on some shelves experience malfunctions in some events without informing the warehouse staff about these technical problems.
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New situation:
You are tasked with establishing a new quality management department to perform and supervise all quality tasks at your Riyadh’s DC and Jeddah’s facility. So, you need to establish all necessary quality approaches and personnel to ensure the effective storage and delivery of the medical supplies.
Task: You’re are required to review the current operational practices and apply necessary improvements to establish necessary quality management process to ensure high-quality operations for your storage and delivery activities to your customers.
You need to consider the following functions when considering the changes:
1. Quality tools to identify the sources and reasons for the current quality problems in your
operations.
2. What quality standards and approaches will you set and apply in the new quality department?
3. New operational practices and approaches to be applied for quality assurance and quality control?
4. New personnel of the quality department including new hires, job responsibilities, required
qualifications and training.
5. Technologies and systems to be used in ensure quality of your storage and delivery activities
6. Performance management metrics and approaches to monitor and improve the quality and
efficiency of your operations.
Your suggested changes need to be based on your understanding of the course’s lectures and any online content that you find. Additionally, you need to search for relevant references on “quality management in medical industry, quality management of medical supplies” and cite some relevant studies to substantiate and validate your recommended changes.
You can make any logical assumptions and constraints in your suggested solution as long as you fully describe them and provide a good rationale for them.