23-CS-4 Engineering Management · December 2013
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
(a) Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement that engages every employee in the ongoing elimination of waste. Rather than relying on occasional large projects, it accumulates many small, low-cost improvements, standardizing each gain through the Plan–Do–Check–Act cycle so that progress is sustained. (b) Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a structured, proactive technique for identifying the ways in which a product or process could fail, assessing the effect and cause of each failure mode, and prioritizing them by a Risk Priority Number formed from the severity, likelihood of occurrence, and likelihood of detection. It directs preventive effort to the highest-risk failures before they occur. (c) Quality Function Deployment (QFD) systematically translates the "voice of the customer" into engineering characteristics and then into design and process requirements, using the "House of Quality" matrix to relate what customers want to how the product will deliver it, ensuring the final design reflects genuine customer priorities.
Root cause analysis (RCA) exists to find and eliminate the fundamental underlying cause of a problem rather than merely treating its symptoms, so that the problem does not recur. Treating symptoms yields temporary relief and repeated failures; addressing root causes produces durable correction. The techniques used to dig deeply into a problem include the Five Whys, which repeatedly asks "why?" until the chain of causation reaches a fundamental, actionable cause; the Fishbone (Ishikawa or cause-and-effect) diagram, which organizes potential causes into categories such as people, methods, machines, materials, measurement, and environment; Pareto analysis, which ranks causes by frequency or impact to focus effort on the vital few; fault-tree analysis, which works deductively from an undesired event down through the combinations of causes; and scatter diagrams and statistical analysis to test suspected cause-and-effect relationships with data.
Industry uses a range of project-management software to plan, schedule, resource, and track projects. The most widely used include Microsoft Project for scheduling, Gantt charts, critical-path analysis, and resource levelling; Primavera (Oracle Primavera P6) for large, complex engineering and construction programs; and collaborative, cloud-based tools such as Jira, Asana, Trello, Smartsheet, and Basecamp for task management and team coordination. Enterprise resource-planning suites (for example SAP) integrate project management with finance and procurement. These tools share core capabilities—work breakdown, dependency and critical-path management, resource allocation, budgeting, and progress reporting—differing mainly in scale, collaboration features, and integration.
Facing recurring warranty failures of a valve assembly, a quality team would run an FMEA to rank failure modes, use a fishbone diagram and Five Whys to trace the dominant field failure to an out-of-specification seal supplier (a materials cause), and apply Pareto analysis to confirm that one defect accounted for most returns. The corrective project—supplier re-qualification and a poka-yoke gauge—would then be planned and tracked in Microsoft Project.
