We have a software developed by our internal software team. Users of my department have been complaining of slowness in downloading each file and uploading. ( weare medical transcription company and I hope you know it's business. listen to the audio and type. Out dept does the quality proofing so listen and read, no typing as such).Downloadinga file includes voice file and a word document, which take some where around 15-20 seconds, around 10-15 seconds to load a demographic pane which will have patient related infromation. And once the proofing is done, the uploading of file take around 10-15 seconds.This is observed based on manual observation. Users have also complained that at times it takes ages to download. so, appx 45 seconds are wasted for each file. Each QA does appx 50 files and we have 50 QAs. So, 45 seconds x 50 files x 50 QAs = Unproductive time per day.

Formally, we have notified to software team and they are working on it. WE have nt even given them the target of within how many seconds a file should download or upload. WE just said optimize it. They are working on that.

With my persoanl interestI have taken the logs ofusers from different shifts and extracted the file name, the time when user clicked to download, when the file got downloaded. Similarly I have extracted the file name, when the user clikced on upload and when exactly the file got uploaded. I have added the total time for upload from the time of click and total time of upload from the time of click and grand total of time spent on download and upload. I have taken first, general,
second and night shift logs. And collected for three days as sample for each QA.

Can any one please tell me what should I do next.

Hi ,

I understand the below approach can be followed to identify if the different shift are any making difference to this i.e are teh measures collected at different shift vary in great proportion which can higlight the congestion in the entire system (if any, which can be due to various reason)

1.Collect sample data (size > 30 ) for all the shifts

2.Check for normality of each of the shift data .(data means the total time taken for downloading and uploading )

3.Calculate Sigma Level to understand the variance and std deviation

The above will give an idea as does the different shift  matters.

Request everyone including faculties in this forum to please comment on my initial proposal so that it will help in understanding my thought process is on the correct direction or not.

 

Thanks ,

Pankaj Kr

Dear Yunus,

 

You have certainly taken a step in the right direction by beginning to collect data. Your question is very open ended and open to interpretation. Pankaj has suggested one of the routes that could be taken - collect data and test the hypothesis that the upload and download time is a function of shift. (keep in mind that the shift may just be a symptom while the actual X may be concurrent users or the internet bandwidth). Similarly, you could get other possible Xs that could be impacting the upload and download time, perhaps size of the file, number of concurrent users etc. Each of the Xs could be tested to check if they are critical or not by collecting data.

 

Depending on what are your critical Xs, you would then want to think of what solutions than fix these factors.