Process Improvements

Process Improvement

Over the past five weeks data has been collected for the process of the timeliest way home from my office in Durham NC home in Raleigh NC. I have tracked data in key areas or steps of the process: the time is takes to get home when leaving the office before five with option A, the time it takes after five. I also collected data for option C for leaving the office before and after five PM. I will discuss what is covered in the bases of this data, I will identify roadblocks of the process and my recommended strategies to overcome them, and then discuss the variables that affect the steps in the process. Lastly, I will discuss the confidence intervals of each step in the process.

Statistical process control

Statistical process control uses data, calculations, and charts that measure and will improve the quality within a process. The objective of statistical process control is to use a control chart to monitor processes that are changed by setting limits. Statistical process control involves testing a random sample of output from a process to determine whether the process is producing items within a preselected range (Chase, Jacobs, and Aquilano, 2006).

Control limits

The “Six Sigma” (2012) website defines control limits as the area three standard deviations on any side of the centerline (mean) of plotted data on a control chart. More specifically, a control chart being a graph that is drawn to show the behavior of a statistical distribution. Generally the graph will have a center line that will represent the mean, the higher control limit represents the control, three degrees above the mean, and the lower control limit representing the control, three degrees below the mean. These limits strongly indicate if the process is considered to be stable or unstable.

In the past five weeks the mean total time for arriving home from work was 38.92 minutes, with a standard deviation of 9.96. The shortest time home was with option A and leaving the office before five at 35 minutes and the longest way home was also option A but after 1:35 minutes. The main bottle neck in this process is leaving the office before five pm. During week three it was determined for me that I would have to remain at work after five the entire week. Therefore the decision to opt for option C all week was implemented.

Option A Option C Option B

Before 5 33.5 minutes 42 minutes N/A

After 5 1:34 minutes 46 minutes 1:11 minutes

Delay 1:53 minutes N/A N/A

This data was also calculated for the entire process and put into a control chart to identify the variations in the driving process.