Process_Implementation_Plan

Getting My Son Ready for School Process Improvement Plan Statistical Process Control (SPC) can assist with monitoring process behavior. According to American Society for Quality (1993), “A control chart helps you record data and lets you see when an unusual event, e.g., a very high or low observation compared with “typical” process performance, occurs”(para. 1). In the case of getting my son ready for school, the parent has collected data each day for five weeks to categorize the necessary steps that would make getting my son ready for school much easier and less time doing. A flowchart was created to describe the daily tasks performed every morning. Cycle time is at least one metric identified to measure the process that would help address the seasonal factors along with the overall confidence intervals. After re-evaluating the current process, the parent has found a solution and created a process improvement plan to suggest the proper steps needed that would be most effective to getting my son ready for school and out the house at 6:30 a.m. every morning. In order to meet the goal of getting my son ready for school, the parent needs at least 1 hour to get ready. Within that hour, the child needs at least 30 minutes. Both need to get ready before 6:30 a.m. Using the current process, the total amount of time to get ready is 300 minutes each week which shows the effect of the seasonal factors from the performance data collected each week. Some factors were found that affected the process of preparation. (1) Will the parent wake up on time each morning the clock alarms' (2) Can devotion time be shorter or be done the night before' (3) Can the parent iron the clothes the night before' Getting up on-time is the first problem relating to the process in week one. The first week started off slow. The parent was late getting up almost everyone morning. This was a deviation from the current process of getting ready in 1 hour. Viewing the data, it took 373 minutes to get ready in week one. This was out of control. After arriving to school, late the first week of school, the parent needed to re-evaluate getting ready in the morning so that my son would be on-time each morning. The next week started to look a much better. Even though the two took longer to get ready two days this week, the total minutes for the second week estimates it took 290 minutes to get ready. My son took longer to get dress because the parent had to iron his clothes. In the third week, getting ready for school became a little easier. The parent decided to enforce a process improvement plan to make the process move a little smoother and less time doing. To help reduce time, the parent eradicated devotion and ironing in the morning. Placing devotion and ironing as preparations the night before to reduce time. These two steps in the current process took at least ten minutes each which would reduce preparation time twenty minutes. Since preparation time has been reduced, my son has enough time to sit down for breakfast instead of taking it to eat in the car. Therefore, in week three, the total minutes took 237 minutes for preparation. In week four, it took 284 minutes to get ready because my son forgot to gather his homework to put in his book bag a few times which reduced the time less doing. It took him at least 10 minutes to gather his homework and rushing to put the book bag in car. We left on-time but there was no time to sit to eat breakfast. We had to leave immediately. Finally, in week five, the two were able to get ready for school with fewer interruptions with the new process that eliminated devotion, ironing, and waking up when clock alarms. Devotion and ironing was done before bed. Waking up late was corrected when the parent stopped hitting the snooze button took 245 minutes this week to prepare my son for school. This left an average of 285.8 minutes / week. A confidence interval is a range of values used to estimate a population parameter and its associated confidence level. So, we construct 95 percent confidence intervals around each of the sample means. According to these results, our 95 percent confidence interval for this random sample of data points for preparation is between 52.19 and 62.13. The tables below gives the calculations and data used to determine the control limits for getting my son ready for school. Table 1: Data used to determine control limits Table 2: Calculations to determine control limits and confidence intervals and their usefulness based on the number of data points. Days 25 mean 57.16 sample variance 145.06 sample standard deviation 12.04 minimum 41 maximum 88 range 47 sum 1,429.00 sum of squares 85,163.00 population variance 139.25 population standard deviation 11.80 standard error of the mean 2.41 confidence interval 95.% lower 52.19 confidence interval 95.% upper 62.13 half-width 4.97 tolerance interval 99.73% lower 21.03 tolerance interval 99.73% upper 93.29 half-width 36.13 median 55.00 mode 59.00 normal curve GOF p-value .3131 chi-square(df=3) 3.56 E 4.17 Chart 3: Plotting the data points. In conclusion, since the mean processing time had increased twenty minutes the process improvement plan eliminating the devotion, ironing, and waking up when clock alarms was a good decision. Now, the fifteen of the twenty minutes can be used to sit down to eat the breakfast instead of eating in car or just doing nothing. The time has been reduced considerably. The parent began to realize after calculating the data using the seasonal factors that affected the data and addressing the confidence intervals that getting up on-time at 5:30 a.m. as planned would definitely make the morning routine a lot smoother process within its control limits of one hour.   References American Society for Quality. (1993). Using Data. Retrieved August 21, 2009, from http://www.asq.org/learn-about-quality/statistical-process-control/overview/overview.html Chase, R. B., Jacobs, F. R., Aquilano, N. J. (2006) Operations Management for Competitive Advantage (11th ed). New York: McGraw Hill/Irwin