Statistical Process Control for Process Improvement

Individual Assignment: Process Improvement Plan

Parnil Chand

OPS/571

May 14, 2012

Professor Abdoulaye Keita, Ph.D.

Process Improvement Plan

Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques can identify weakness in process, measure the weakness in process, and the impact of weaknesses on process. Process managers use tools such as SPC techniques as tools to measure efficiency, mainly inefficiencies in the process based on measured metrics. The results from SPC can be used to find methods to improve the process. The results can be used to compare the standard demanded from the management and actual process performance (Lind, Marchal, & Wathen, 2008).  In addition, the analysis of process metrics provides information to benchmark and compare with competitiors process to gain competitive advantage.

Further, Trend analysis is important in considering improvement. Dependent process can be improved by better facilitating, and improving the independent process. For example, an improved supply chain can help remove process bottlenecks in the dependent process by reducing their process time considerably. An organization needs to continue to measure the changes in performance using SPC as part of process improvement plan.

Process Description

The process for preparing customer correspondence documents for imaging has a set standard time of 120 minutes. The management believes that the demand time set for the process should be adequate. However, the process requires an average of 167 minutes to complete. The major variance is because of added wait time created by bottlenecked departments and their process. The process analyzed is a dependent process and as a result has a risk of becoming the capacity contrained resource. The waititng time is on many occasions more than the additional capacity allowed time. Goldratt identifies capacity constrained resources as resources whose utilization is close to capacity and could become a bottleneck if it is not scheduled...