EVALUATION OF MBS QUALITY ASSURANCE STANDARDS AND SYSTEMS USED AT FUEL DEPOT AND FILLING STATIONS OF MALAWI

The cases of selling poor quality liquid fuel has been daily alarm which perturbing the customers and nation to cause poor engine performance (engine wear) and other associated consequences. Therefore, the aim of this study titled “evaluation of MBS Quality Assurance Standards and Systems used at Fuel depots and Filling Stations” is to develop a framework that can drive and efforts for continual improvement of the depots and service station quality approach in operations and particularly for improvement of diesel and petrol fuel quality assurance system in reference to applicable requirements of the MS-113, 114, 121 and MS-172 of Malawi Standards was realised by means of checklist and questionnaire, from which I identified non-conformities.
There is average overall non-compliance of 38.89% (7 from 33 applicable requirements. Thus using the ‘5 whys’ approach (root cause analysis) and Pareto diagrams I found that 54% of identified non-conformities result from poor documentation and poor implementation of procedures, 14% from Poor regulatory and quality control team/watch amongst others.
I acknowledge that it might not be possible to meet all requirements of Malawi standards immediately since there is different quality management systems (private and Government), and life span of storage tanks, and therefore, is will be essential to allow different acceptable operations that can effectively impact in quality assurance according to standards. I then used the FMEA approach to analyse these non-conformities and ranked them according to their effective cost maintenance in fuel quality. The results from arrangement highlighted four most critical findings with highest performed and cost management of quality assurance.
These are: the non-existence of quality assurance and operational manual, personnel lack of training (formal experts); poor fuel storage tank cleaning periods, poor documentation and implementation of quality assurance procedures.
I then develop an action plan, a monitoring plan and a follow-up plan to ensure effective complied with required standards and operational systems for improvement of fuel quality in supply chain systems.