I bought a table for table tennis as a Christmas present for my son, since the winter in this northern state was too cold and too long to exercise outside. I hoped that playing table tennis in basement can be a good winter exercise to my son. So I bought the assembling type table made in China with just $125. Cheep!!
I have no problem at all with assembling a furniture because I used many pieces of assembling type furniture from IKEA. And I expected that the table for table tennis could be the same as the IKEA’s products. But it wasn’t at all.
The quality of the table was terrible. As a person who knew quality control using Lean Six Sigma, the quality of the table was unforgivable. Although it was cheep, the manufacture should not sell such poor quality product if they knew the meaning of shame.
First of all, the cardboard package was too thin and fragile for such heavy-weight product. When I selected the package at the store, it was hard to find a package in good shape because many of the packages in the warehouse were damaged. Also, it was really hard to carry it back to home in safe.
Secondly and the most of all, there was no prepared hole for screw. The table assembly needed 184 screws. Instead of prepared holes for the screws, there were just marks. And even worse, the location of the marks were completely off to the parts.
A very cheap and useless screw driver came with the table. It looked like a piece of metal. I even wondered how to use it.
Furthermore, the length of the legs were uneven, and the size of metal parts which should connect the two pieces of table were too small.
I should have returned it back to the store, it didn’t because of another hard work of disassembling and transport.
Fortunately, I was able to assemble the table by using many electric hand tools with creating alternative parts such as the legs. But I wondered how other customers treated the table, and how the store dealt with customer claims
I expected of it the quality of IKEA furniture, but it could be too much on it. At the same time, I wondered how IKEA kept the good quality of their products.
So I tried to search an article on Internet with a phrase “IKEA Lean Six Sigma”. Then I got the article titled “Improving Customers Service at IKEA Using Six Sigma Methodology”.
According to the article, IKEA reduced the customer clams from 333 to 43 using VOC, SIPOC, Kano Model, 5 Whys, Fish-bone Diagram, and Statistical Analysis in Lean Six Sigma (DMAIC) framework.
Considering the quality of IKEA products, IKEA with Lean Six Sigma made sense to me.
P.S. My son liked the table tennis table and played with it.