fowzieh

Dear SJ, Thank you for your response. I have currently initiated doing a Current Value Stream Mapping for one of the processes. There is an opportunity for doing a Six Sigma project there, however, before I do that, I wanted to see if there are any areas that I could identify with my team to reduce the cycle time or eliminate waste. When I said a Lean event, I meant Kaizen - a process improvement activity. The example that you gave on 5 Why's has helped me understand how we can use the Lean tools in Six Sigma. I shall dicuss this further when we meet on Friday. Thanks Again, Fowzieh

Has anyone run a lean event in their organization and integrated it with a Six sigma project? What are the steps to run a Lean event? What are the learnings from each step? How can you integrate Lean with a Six sigma project?

Fowzieh / Suresh Pl clarify : 1. You decided to do daily audits now after seeing the sample size requirements of 1254, or was it the prevalent practice ? --It is a prevalent practice to do a daily audit. The internal Quality check is done on a daily basis and the external audit scores are sent by the client on a weekly basis. All the errors that are identified by the Internal/external QA are sent to the users to either rebut or rectify the errors keeping the respective supervisor in loop ( real time correction ) 2. Pl elaborate on this : "if I had non-production resource/ non-revenue generating resource-(NRGFTE) ( QA ) do the audit" Otherwise is it a self-validation by you daily? - The NRGFTE is a resource identified within the specific process. They are responsible to do the audit for the entire team and release the error list / accuracy scores on a daily basis to take corrrective action. It is overhead cost, would have to bear it to meet the Customer SLA and have an internal control. 3. Or you directly doing the data-entry yourselves, and correcting them on-line (ie. Live - in this case its not audit ! ), or checking them at end of day (this is extra-audit)? - No 4. Are you now concluding that since monthly audit sample size being n=1785 (N= 80,000), you are now opting for this in lieu of daily audit n= 1254 (N= 4000)? - Yes 5. If that being so, you will be postponing your corrective actions till end of month? . I don't know the implications of such delay from customer perspective , or cost implications, etc... Pl clarify the nature of transactions ; this may be a huge COPQ issue. - Based on the sample size which is 1785 for the month - that is distributed over the number of days in the month = 1785/21 and 85 becomes the target for the QA on a daily basis. So eventually the errors that are identified on a daily basis are rectified and the accuracy scores shared with the respective team members. 6. the sample sizes were generated assuming your response expectation accuracy is 95% (as per VK) , with 95% CI. and with ±1% Error margin. Remember customer SLA is 98% desired. He wants this to be your min.response level, in which case your margin of error should be ± 2% ( NOT ± 1% as per VK assumptions) . VK to clarify this, please. Am I missing something here? If 98% is min desired, then customer could expects ( 100% to 98%), ie 99% ±1% 7. In view of pt 6 above sample sizes will change 8. Fowzieh, you mentioned your team accuracy now is 99.6%, pretty good, then your sample sizes will come down? - We normally do a total of 4000 or more samples a month which I could reduce and thereby reduce my overhead cost based on the performance of the team 9. At the end of the day , I still don't get it why should you do a monthly audit because of your high volumes ? - Like I said it is not a monthly audit, it is done on a daily basis 10. Fowzieh : How do you search and track your Data entry errors whether on a daily or monthly basis? Do you red tag them for later corrections -- Searching the errors is done by the QA. Tracking the errors is on the excel spread sheet report and the erros are sent to the user for correction / rebuttal. The rebuttals are verified by the supervisor for corrective action. 11. Mr. Suresh : you mentioned the Calculator did the sampling at 50% "power". Is this the 50% response accuracy referred above? (later changed to 95% per VK). You mentioned "If you desire a higher power of test (1-beta), you need to use a formula that includes power in the sample size calculations" . Does this imply the raosoft formula does not build-in (1-beta) power , and we have to resort to manual formula calculations? 12. Regarding the distributions, it is Hypergeometric not Binomial but ultimately the Normal approx are being used in the formula : Comments Regards George Varkey

Hi George - Please find my response to the following question- 1. Why should you be doing a monthly data entry audit (at end of month I suppose) if you are handling such high transactions? A: The audit is done on a daily basis for the process that I handle. The avg. volume per day is 4000 out of which if I had non-production resource/ non-revenue generating resource ( QA ) do the audit, 1254 is a huge sample to check on a daily basis. However, with the assumptions that were mentioned earlier - with an overall Vol received avg for the month - 80K - the sample size was 1785 - which is much more doable and agreeable from business perspective. Having said that my team is at 99.6% accuracy level which is pretty good at a transaction level. I was more curious about the way Sample Size is calculated and I guess as SJ mentioned its a business decision that the co. has to make. Thanks for throwing light on the type of data distributions. Regards, Fowzieh

Thank you Suresh and Madhu!

Hello Everyone, I am trying my hands on Minitab and was wondering if someone could guide me to a site/a book where one could learn to master the software with relevant examples that could be used in the BPO / ITES sector, also be able to interpret the relevance of each menu item in Minitab. Your support would be appreciated. Thanks, Fowzieh

That answers my question. Thanks Vishwadeep. Regards, Fowzieh

Hello Vishwadeep, Thanks for your response. The link is very helpful. If I consider the Average Total Volumes processed in a month as the population which is let's assume 80000. Margin Error - 1% CI - 95% Response Distribution - 95% The sample size is 1785. - Since the population is for 1 month, can the target for the Quality analyst be - 1785 / 20 [ considering 20 working days in a month] which is 89.25 ~ 90 records a day? Also - Can the previous month's volume processed can be considered as the population to calculate the sample size? Or Is it always better to take a day wise sample size based on the volume cleared on the previous day? With the following population size and the rest of the numbers as mentioned above - the sample sizes are: Day Wise Volume processed - 4000 - 1254 Week Wise Volume processed - 20000 - 1673 Monthwise Volume Processed - 80000 - 1785 I am guessing if I freeze on 1785 as the sample, I could divide that into no. of days in a month and the result (90) can be the target for the Quality Analyst. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks, Fowzieh

Is there a way to calculate the appropriate sample size to do internal audit in a data entry process? Avg. production per day is 4000 records. Team size 75. Client SLA - 98% - DPMO. Thanks, Fowzieh