nvramprasad

Dear Syed, I second Mr.Latesh. You need to be listening into the Voice of business/customer and identify areas of chronic problems for which solution is not known. In fact, we just completed a six sigma project on telesales in our company (we're having our project sign off next week). The VOB was that our company was going through a low growth phase for a while and our strategic business objective was not being met. So, we went to the drawing board, drew a problem tree diagram and embarked on a project to improve the sales force effectiveness. I suggest you talk to the person who owns the telesales operations and find out the areas that require turnaround improvement. That could be a pretty good area to start with. Best Regards, Ram

Approach 2 is more accurate allright, but does it work only when OFE is 1?

Well, if Std Dev cannot be reduced, USL continues to be 4 mins and we're not predetermined about reaching a sigma value of 4 (even if we do, we wont be able to reach it unless you have a -ve TAT), reducing the mean from 5 to 4 mins seems to be the only way around to bring about some improvements.

Ari, that was a pretty good attempt at analyzing the responses posted in so far. There are couple of points I'd like to clarify. => Speaking of defectives and defects, in this particular situation each project is considered a product. And if a product has one or more areas that do not conform to the specs,i.e. defects, that product is said to be defective. In this situation, if a project exceeds the 4 min period, that particular project is considered defective. Whether such a defective piece of project will have any practical significance is beyond the scope of discussion (given the very limited overall picture we have been given). But the fact remains that those individual projects which have the DEFECT of not meeting the TAT in 4 mins are DEFECTIVES! => With regards to reducing the SD from 2 min to 0.33, yes, it is common knowledge that it is one of the many possible solutions. We would've been able to pin-point a solution, if we're entrusted with the liberty of taking this as a case-study and been given all the data required. Right now, in this situation, the solution strategy is beyond the scope of discussion and therefore, it may not be apt to indicate whether one's point of view holds water or not. => Again, a great job in putting together your view points of the different responses. But do you have a first cut response to the situation posted by Suresh? Best Regards, Ram

USL itself is only 4 minutes. If you're going to reduce your AVERAGE to 4 minutes, you'd still be allowing the project to have a TAT of more than 4 minutes, as long as the average is maintained at 4 minutes. Statistically, you'd still be generating a lot of defectives, except for the fact that the sigma value would have reduced from a -ve value to zero. One of the sensible approaches might be to reduce the average to 2 and SD to .33...one of the many possible combinations....