Quality statistics - Research Paper Example

Here quality plays a significant role in ensuring the survival of companies in tough competitive businesses by inspecting the existing processes and discovering the new ones. In order to manufacture goods or offer products or services to the customers, companies employ different processes. A process is defined as a collection of interrelated and planned activities carried out to produce goods (products) and services (Oakland, 2008). There are different variations associated with each process due to number of sources and factors.

Berger and Hart (1986) highllighted that variations can be inherent to the process due to its nature and are terms as common causes of variation. However, there are variations in process that result from external sources or special causes and are termed as special causes of variation. Since 1920s manufacturing has benefitted from the SPC techniques in its decision making processes (Morestream, 1920). Especially, this is true with the control charts that help to identify if a variation is really present and assist to determine if the actions need to be taken to bring the process back in statistical controls.

The strength of the statistical process control techniques is its simplicity and ease in understanding equally at the management and worker level as appreciated by Thompson and Koronacki (2002). Statistical process controls allows objective investigation of the parts or whole of a process that may mask sources of variations that interfere with the level of product quality. If detected, SPC can help to numerically measure the significance of the variations and subject these to correction (Wheeler and Chamber, 2010).

Consequently, the controlling of variations would reduce wastes and improve the product quality. It is crucial to understand that not all the SPC techniques are applicable to all scenarios and largely depend on type of the data and the type of the variation under investigation (Czitrom and Spagon, 1997). For example, in this report we have analyzed the processes of providing the customer support services by an IT Call Center. In this aspect, the major quality issue was the call waiting time i.e., average waiting time during a service call.

This is the time when the customer is holding on the phone line and waiting to be connected to any of the customer service representative. Introduction From the conception to design and further to manufacturing of a product, the variations introduced during initial processes become manifold towards the delivery of the product to the customer and severely impact the quality of the product. Oakland (2008) explains that there are two major types of variations in the process; common and special variations.

The common variations are generally intrinsic to the process and cannot be eliminated without modifying and even eliminating the process or switching to an entirely new process. On the other hand, special causes are a result of some causes that are identifiable and assignable and usually appear in more periodic fashion, thus these can be identified and can be reduced/removed with eliminating the source of variation that does not involve process changes (ASQ, 1920). In an effort to identify the process variation and understand the process behavior, statistical techniques and probabilistic methods would be used for analysis.

The analysis would be based on the actual