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Although Quality Digest often has in-depth articles about the nuances of control charts, I’ve found that many beginners are at a loss to figure out how to organize their data, especially in service industries such as health care, hotels, and food. They complain that the examples are all manufacturing-oriented. While it’s pretty simple to organize the data, this hurdle seems insurmountable to many.
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Data for services: defects and turnaround times
Services are concerned with two things: defects (i.e., mistakes, errors, omissions, etc.) and turnaround times. So for most defect-related applications we need a date, the number of defects, the sample size (total number of opportunities for a defect), and the percentage of nonconforming units. These four columns give you the ability to create p charts, u charts, or XmR charts (aka the X and moving range chart or the Individuals chart)—the most common charts in service industries. For ease of charting, organize the data in columns, not rows. Figure 1 shows what the column headings would look like in Microsoft Excel.
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Comments
Control Charts for Services
The author of the subject article did not comment on the specific distributional requirements for using p and u charts. Data that do not follow the distributional requirements will not produce reliable charts. The author does not say if he tested the data and found them suitable.
KISS
For industries having difficulty with control charts, forget about p and u charts and use XmR instead. They would also do well to forget about the Six Sigma nonsense and its ridiculous foundations. Measure things and chart measurements wherever possible, rather than counting defects.
Systems thinking rather than tracking the data
As there is one example quoted in above article- one of the customers asked.."how to track the number of times people dont follow established procedures"?This question itself reveals the lack of profound knowledge and the Customer's organization health status.There is very good oppurtunity to improve more which would fix majority of the problems without plotting any control chart in the first instance itself
as its obvious,There is zero benefit of counting the number of people dont follow established procedures...all you have to do is..first define the problem clearly and do rootcause analysis..again, there is no scientific study required here to perform this.Just ask a common sense question- Why people are not following procedures ? is that all people ? or few?If its the case with all people, then your procedures are not easy to follow..revise your procedures..however, its not better to advise without first understanding- what are those procedures established for which its hard to follow?If its the case with only few people- then yes its the responsibility of management to apply holistic solution to fix any uneven things. Systems thinking approach helps here to understand the things in bigger picture. There is very excellent reference available "leaders handbook" by Scholtes to understand and fix the above type of problems.
http://j.palem.in/blog/
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