Statistical quality control of temperature and moisture content in black tea manufacturing industry

Abstract

The manufacturing organization has built its reputation basing on the quality of its product or services. Quality has become a universal value and in order to be able to provide customers with good products, manufacturing organizations are required to ensure that their processes are monitored continuously and product quality is improved. Kenyan tea is one of the top foreign exchange earners alongside tourism, horticulture and Kenyan coffee. Kagira et.al (2012) pointed out that currently Kenya is ranked third behind China and India in tea production. Kenya being the world‘s top exporter in black tea, the quality of tea becomes the key concern.Various methods have been used by different analyst to determine the quality of black tea .This research was mainly concerned with controlling the temperatures and moisture content of black tea in fermentation and driers section by using statistical quality control in order to achieve the best quality of black tea.Experiments were conducted in a sample of ten production days and the data was analyzed using Ms Excel and SPSS where by the quality control X-bar and R charts were realized .These charts provided the control limits of temperature and moisture content in various sub-sections of fermentation and driers.From this research we found out that the fermentation section is in control while the driers section is out of control. The mean moisture content of black tea differs among the samples. These results indicate the presents of assignable and chance causes of variations.