FINAL PROJECT

By Aleksey Narko

Index: 18782

Subject: Quality Management

Company profile

"Have you ever made lasagne? Well, it’s the same for skis… it’s no more complicated than

that!” Julien Vigouroux, Sales Manager in Dynastar.

Skis Rossignol like when things go downhill at least when their skis and snowboards do so.

Being one of the biggest producers of Nordic, alpine equipment, snowboards as well as

accessories and outdoors the company unites the brands such as Rossignol, Dynastar, Lange, and

Look. Moreover it has the longest company history in the industry which started in 1907. The products of

the company have been worn by many Olympians and world champions since 1936 Winter Olympic

games. In 1972, Rossignol became the world’s leading ski manufacturer. Headquartered in Voiron, a

small town in southeastern France, the company was among the first to make skis in France and was an

early leader in ski technology and design. Rossignol has 2 factories in Europe (France and Spain) and

Dynastar factory in the US producing in total 850000 pairs of skis per year. By 2000, almost 40 percent

of all downhill skis sold throughout the world were manufactured by Rossignol. The company is a

subsidiary of Chartreuse & Mont Blanc, itself owned by Australia's Macquarie Group. The key to the

company’s success is continuous development process and investing money in new technologies in an

unstable market with lots of competitors.

Quality issues

"A layer of paste, a layer of meat, a layer of béchamel sauce and cheese. That makes really good

skis, we just have to heat it up and it all slides down all on its own!"

Julien Vigouroux, Sales Manager in Dynastar.

First skis were created by human beings around 4000-5000 years ago. These first skis were

probably used for hunting, travelling, military maneuvers and practical means of transportation.

First skis created for recreation were built in 1850s. At this time there were just few enthusiasts

who were experimenting on constructing a new way to have fun. The skis got more popularity in

the early 1900's when its quick development process started to take place.

First materials used to build skis were different kinds of wood such as ash, pine and larch chosen

for their flexibility and resilience. Than in order to protect wood it started to be laminated. But

the progress didn’t stop at this point. Soon enough the ski manufacturers started to experiment

with different kinds of metal such as aluminum and even titanium, fiberglass, plastic, Kevlar,

carbon, etc. Nowadays we can see a mixture of all these materials used in ski production. The

facilities for ski production also changed a lot: from small sheds full of saws and hammers to the

multimillion factories full of employees and clever machines. The main issue of Rossignol

company is how to produce high-quality skis according to all the standards, tastes of the

customers, change in fashion and design, “quickly-running” technologies, lots of competitors,

etc.

The main quality issue for the ski-producing company like Rossignol is how to make good-

quality skis and control all the processes of multimillion factories. They need to take care about

the design trends, have a look on their competitors to compare the products. Moreover they need

to invest millions in research and development, improving the quality and usage of materials and

using new technologies. In the 21 century Rossignol factory mainly consists of high-technology

machines and people who operate them. How to control their performance? How to build durable

skis that won’t break a month after buying? How to make the skis that would fit different people

that will be using them in a great variety of conditions? These are the important questions that

the quality managers of Rossignol answer every day.

Producing skis is quite similar to cooking lasagna. You never get a perfect dish from the first

time. The same is happening with skis. The combination of the materials, form, size and other

aspects of production are checked all the time. This highly-technological process is very

complicated. The first pairs of skis go through different tests to check their week and strong

points and find the mistakes before actually being put on the production line in huge quantities.

This is how the piece of wood becomes the piece of technological art.

Quality Management problems and techniques.

"One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment

. . . ; If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along."

Franklin D.Roosevelt

House of quality

House of quality is a good technique to find the companies weak and strong points as well as to

compare it with the competitor’s effectiveness and find out what can and should be improved. It

shows the relationships between the customers desires and engineers (companies) capabilities.

This technique can help Rossignol see their strengths and weaknesses and change in a better way

in order to get a bigger market share. First of all is to find the main competitors of the company.

It has many of them, big almost fully-automized firms like Atomic, Fischer and Salomon to the

small companies producing hand-made skis like Aluflex.

According the World Cup brand Ranking 2006-2010, which shows the Ski Champions and the

equipment they are using Rossignol takes the second place in the combined table of ski

manufacturers. It shows that there are more men and women wearing Atomic skis and less

wearing Salomon ones compared to Rossignol.

This is why I have chosen these companies to be the main competitors for my company X

(Rossignol) in the house of quality.

When we take the part including customer requirements I have chosen the price, comfort,

reliability, look and durability to be the most important. From the engineers’ perspective unit

cost, quality, performance, design and durability are the most significant factors.

Two circles represent strong correlation, one represents small correlation and line means no

correlation at all.

A letter represents Atomic company

B is for Salomon

X stands for Rossignol

The price affects the performance of the skis a lot. The cheaper the skis the worse will be their

performance in different conditions, because the quality of the materials would be not so good

and skis won’t go downhill as good as their more expensive competitors. The design is also

influenced by the price. The less you pay for your skis the less attractive and fashionable they

look. Durability of the skis also depends on the quality of the materials and the price as well

therefore cheap skis usually live less than their expensive opponents.

The comfort of the skis depends a lot on their quality. The better the materials used in the

production process are the better you feel when you use your skis. The performance also affects

comfort a lot. The more problems you have when you go downhill the less comfortable you feel.

Reliability depends a bit on the quality of the materials as well as the performance factor. The

better the quality of the ski materials and the more confident you feel when you use them the

more you rely on them when having fun going on mountains and cliffs.

The look of the skis depends a lot on the design and modern trends. Ski industry is like clothing

one, both have designers that get their inspiration from daily life. It is also affected by the price.

The more you pay-the more beautiful they are!

Durability is dependent on the cost. But it is weak dependence because modern technologies

don’t give almost any chance for even the cheapest skis to break unexpectedly. The more

important fact is the quality of the materials: either it is fiberglass with wood and carbon or

titanium with Kevlar and wooden base. Durability also depends a lot on the performance. It is

quite natural: the better they perform- the longer they live.

When we take into account competitive evaluation of the brands Rossignol has no competition

at all in their look and comfort they bring to their owners. They are modern, colorful, well-

projected and designed. Moreover those skis appeal to different age groups from the very young

children to the older professionals. When it comes to comfort Rossignol is also the absolute

winner. They spend 13 million dollars on modernization of their factories for the period of 2012-

2013. What for? To buy new machines and train their employees in order to bring their

customers better, more comfortable skis.

Rossignol got three when it comes to the price factor. Maybe because they value their brand

name and don’t make any effort to change the formula: “quality not quantity”. Moreover most of

their factories are situated in Europe where they are getting access to more qualified labor and

quicker availability of new technologies which brings extra costs.

Rossignol is on the 4th

position when it comes to reliability and durability. It comes from the fact

that not all 100% of customers are satisfied how the firm performs in those aspects. But these

factors will never satisfy the customers- there is always a way to improve.

How can Rossignol improve their situation? From my point of view they can change the places

of Manufacture to the places with cheaper labor and better price and availability of natural

resources. These places can be found in Asia, such as China or India, but unfortunately they have

their own drawbacks which are making the process more complicated. More important fact is to

improve the quality control in order to get better feedback from the customers and get new

clients. The third feature is improving the experimental base while testing the skis. This means

improving the relationship between the number of tests and the number of broken or bad-quality

skis. Another factor is employing more creative designers. In today’s world everything is based

on creativity, people want to be different from the others and look fashionable. That is why the

necessity for more creative stuff appears. Another factor that Rossignol can improve is to use

new, more durable and quality materials to make their skis “immortal” after long usage in

difficult situations.

According to the engineering perspective the most important factors in producing Rossignol skis

are design and quality. The brand is extremely successful because it is working all the time

improving the mixture of those elements, by using brand-new techniques, technologically-

developed machines and professional workers in their production process. The other components

that got 4 points each are durability and performance. According to the customer’s feedback they

are very happy when it comes to Rossignol ski performance in different nature and weather

situations. Furthermore modern materials used in ski production nowadays almost never break

and fail to perform according to the expectations. Unit cost doesn’t care Rossignol manufacturers

a lot. They are on a good price way offering the great variety of their customers goods of high

price and good prices compared to the competitors.

When it comes to the dependence between the factors, unit cost of the skis depends a lot on the

quality of the materials used. This tendency is the same in all the products, not only skis.

Performance of the skis depends on the quality and price which are strongly connected with each

other. The better, more expensive, quality skis you have-the better you feel when you use them.

That is why the pair of skis used by the Olympic champions can easily cost more than a thousand

dollars. Durability has also strong correlation with the quality, which is also natural. When the

company uses the most advanced technologies and materials it can easily create strong and at the

same time flexible skis, which can be used even in the most difficult situations.

Wheel of Deming

In the Rossi production of the skis employees implement also the quality technique known as the

wheel of Deming which consists of four parts such as plan, do, check and act.

Plan: First of all engineers, using computer programs, plan the skis should look like. It comes to

everything from the types of materials used, color and design of the skis to the time necessary to

bake the skis in a special machine so that they perform well and be durable enough.

Do: After planning a small sample of skis is produced for testing.

Check: Than different types of tests take place. Engineers painstakingly check the final

product’s shape and flexibility, using special tests that measure the precise shape of the ski under

different loads, as well as measuring the strength of the ski every 5 cm along its length. If the

skis are not within the special limits, the adjustments are made to the production line, rerun the

tests until everything is ready for the main production process.

Act: Once all the kinks in the production has been worked out, the factory goes into full

production, which is limited when it comes to the skis for the Olympiads and professional

sportsmen and consists of about 10 pairs coming out of each mold per day.

Business process reengineering

Rossignol Company is a very big organization with more than 1100 employees who work in 20

sites worldwide. Company has 15 offices in Europe, North America and Asia. Rossignol’s

annual turnover is 270m. In order to manage such a big organization the company needs good IT

base. But the problem with it was to combine all the decentralized IT services to a central

location in order to reduce the money spent on it without affecting the employee productivity and

application performance. Each regional office of the company had its own IT resources. There

was a lot of mess with this because of the great number of servers, enterprise planning systems

and domain controllers which were extremely difficult to control one by one. The idea was to

centralize in order to increase the ease of operating and reduce the exploding costs.

The decision was made to use Riverbed technologies to centralize the Enterprise Planning

Systems to a central location and optimization of WAN performance. Wan in this case is the

geographically dispersed telecommunications network which is used by the Rossignol company

to store, transfer and exchange information.

Riverbed Steelhead appliances helped the company optimize the WAN network and decrease the

latency associated with many file formats. After this improvement employees could get the

necessary document from the network in 4 seconds instead of 50 like it was before.

Moreover the change in the IT eliminated the necessity to back up data by the local stuff; it is

done automatically at the end of the day by the new appliances. It means that the information

became more secure. Furthermore it also improved the application performance which now

enables the company employees do their job quicker and more effectively.

In addition the company implemented an e-commerce program 4 years ago with the help of the

Shopatron Company. E-commerce represents buying and selling products on-line. The company

decided to use this technique because it represents the fastest growing consumer sales channel in

the world. It is not surprising taking into consideration the growing number of computers and

internet being used nowadays. The program was mainly oriented for the retailers which were

very excited by the implementation of the new technique in the sales between them and

Rossignol. Moreover the program helped to improve partnership relations between both sides.

Nevertheless the biggest result was seen from the sales side. They increased by 40%. Moreover

the company got the ability to sell their products to the most important skiers and improve the

transparency of the whole selling process. The other important issue was that the retailers

became more confident in a brand as their quality parts and products supplier.

Both of these reengineering techniques were used mainly in order to reduce costs and increase

efficiency. If the company like Rossignol wants to be competitive at the market it needs to use

modern methods such as IT transformation and going online as business is never standing at one

place, but continuously moving forward, especially in such an unstable field as sportgoods

production.

Personal suggestions to the company:

If I was the director in Rossignol Company I will put more emphasis in the quality control of my

company. Of course it is extremely hard to exist in such an unstable industry were trends are

changing so rapidly, where you depend on the modern trends, research and development,

designers and many other forces in order to create a product which is not perfect, but at least

very close to being it.

It was quite hard to find enough information about Rossignol quality management, maybe

because this is like the industry producing goods for the army, where there are lots of

competitors and everything is kept in secret. From my point of view the company should be

more open to the changes and their customers. They should listen to their feedback and improve

their products according to it. They should try to implement more quality management

techniques to become more competitive.

For example Rossignol can use Six Sigma in the production process and set their goal to 3,4

pairs of defective skis per million. Of course will be more difficult than with Motorola (the

company that first implemented this technique) mobile phones as skis are bigger and more

difficult to transport and store. Moreover ski production is mostly mass-production business

where it is quite hard to implement such changes and get such perfect results.

Moreover the company can easily use Kaizen technique to improve their quality and focus on the

issues which are very important in delivering high-quality products to the customer such as

purchasing and logistics, as the mistakes are not only made in the production line, but also

outside of the factory.

All this techniques are very valuable in improving the quality of Rossignol products. Moreover

the company should remember that the best way for the company is not to focus on one

technique, but to combine and mix the usage of a number of different quality management

instruments.