Mayank Gupta

There was an accident in the recently concluded German Grand Prix where a wheel did not go correctly and it flew and hit a cameraman. Given that the wheels need to be replaced during the flash pit stops (close to 3 seconds), it needs to be done with 100% accuracy and precision. On the face of it, it might appear that it was a manual error by the mechanic (the wheel gun slipped from his hand), but in the fast paced life of F1 safety of crew and drivers is of prime importance. This lead to the identification of a design fault on the wheel gun and Red Bull team will be revising it to ensure that such an accident doesn't occur again. An excellent example of how an RCA should be performed. Full article below: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/racing/top-stories/F1-Red-Bull-change-pitstop-procedures/articleshow/21022022.cms

Unfortunate but it's true.....every industry has an excessive focus on automations......even in service industry there are examples where automations have not yielded the desired benefits...

The difference lies in the definition iteself. DPMO (Defects per Million Opportunities) talk about the defects while DPPM (Defectives parts per Million) talks about the defectives. Take an example: A car manufacturer produces 1000 cars with each car having 50 checkpoints. Hence Units - 1000 Opportunities - 1000*50 = 50000 Assume, 10 cars are defective while the total number of defects are 250 (i.e. these 10 cars cumulatively failed on 250 checkppoints). Hence Defectives - 10 Defects - 250 DPMO = 250/50000*1000000 = 5000 DPPM = 10/1000*1000000 = 10000 Typically in a service industry, Customer is more concerned with DPPM. For a service provider it makes more sense to look at DPMO. Even if they start working with DPPM, they will eventually have to drill down to the defects that are rendering the service as defective. Not sure if the same logic applies to manufacturing, but even though DPPM is an excellent metric to track the performance of the manufacturing unit, for any improvements you still need to look at DPMO.

Hi I'm looking for a list of metrics that will be applicable in a BPO / back office operations environment. Does anyone have it ready? Pls share with me at mrgupta.mayank@gmail.com thanks Mayank Gupta

Background - There are 15 different case types that we get in one process. The total volume for the process is summation of the volumes of these individual case types. A project requires me to check whether the volume mix (over the 15 case types) has been consistent or not as compared to a baselined volume mix. What test can be used?

Came across this interesting question today..... My baseline data contains 1000 units. Number of opportunities per unit is 5. A total of 400 units were audited resulting in 500 defects. So what should be used as the no. of units for DPMO calculation? Should it be 1000 (no. of units considered for baselining) or 400 (number of units audited)? Thanks Mayank Gupta

Hi VK Great thought and superb creativity. You should add a CFO of the company as well, who typically is after Param to cut down the costs and takes a magnifying glass to validate benefits from a project!!

Isn't normality a pre-requisite for plotting control charts?

Related query How do I check for the stability of non-normal data? And what is the course of action in case we find that the data is not stable?

Amazing thought VK. I have a situation described as below Being in service industry, the metrics of Resource Utiliztion and Productivity are paramount for us. Like any other service industry, we do track the time an agent takes to process. We have an automated time tracker. What usually happens is an agent comes into office, starts the time tracker and leaves it on for the full day. Before leaving he signs out from the time tracker - thereby showing that he was only working on the process the whole day. Now this is IMPOSSIBLE. The challenge here is that he forgets or does not want to enter the break times / training times etc. How can this be tracked and monitored? My initial thoughts on this is to have a metric which says # of instances he did not update the tracker per the total # of times he was suppose to update it. E.g. Assuming he took 1 break and attended 1 training. Assuming that he needs to start and stop time for each activity, he will have to update the tracker 10 times (1 break, 1 training and 3 processing activities). Any suggestions???

Agree with you VK. A couple of things that needs to be kept in mind while doing hypothesis: The concept of sample and population and the fact that whenever we take a sample there are chances that the test statistic will not be equal to the population parameter. More often than not, we are more interested in the alternate hypothesis as that makes my life interesting If after hypothesis, I get a high P, means the statistic from the sample in question is probably "insignificantly" different to the population parameter. however, there could be samples where the statistic could be "significantly" different from the population parameter. Not sure if this example would fit in this case but recently came across a case where even after project completion the 2 proportion test was not showing significant improvement. The problem here was that the baseline data was for 6 months and the improvement data was for only 1 week. Once we compared the improvement data for 1 complete month, we could notice a significant improvement in the project. We concluded that we needed to have a more appropriate sample for the test to give "significant" results

Hi All Today when I will complete the training, I would have trained 100+ guys on six sigma. Every training has been a new learning experience for me. Training others have kept me closer to the concepts and provided me a better understanding of the same. I guess this comes primarily from the fact that you first need to be clear on concepts before training others. Participants have asked me questions which have forced me to revisit the books and six sigma concepts, but recently in my training somebody asked me "Why is it called Six Simga and not by any other name" and I found his question to be very innocent and relevant. Any answers for this??? Starting this topic to know how have your experience been with training people on six sigma and what's the most interesting question that people have ever asked?

That's great news VK, just goes to show the relevance of the web-site and the efforts you are putting in to make it a success. What are the other sites (i guess ASQ will be there)?

Superb