Background -DAG Laboratory

DAG Laboratory (thereafter DAG for short) is an independent clinical laboratory that provides medical diagnostic and testing services to various hospitals and medical institutions. DAG is also expanding its business to provide diagnostic and testing services to individual consumers. DAG has been playing an important role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic by providing nucleic acid tests to consumers.

Since its establishment, DAG grows steadily due to an increase in demand in the testing market. However, due to capacity constraints in the Laboratory Department, DAG is not able to achieve its TAT (turnaround time) target on the testing services. On the other hand, competition in the testing market becomes increasingly intense, and DAG has to increase its investment in the Marketing Department for business development.

DAG has to recruit employees in its laboratory and marketing departments to cope with the increasing testing demand and the market competition. The Human Resource (HR) Department is responsible for staff recruitment. However, in the past few months, the two department managers have complained that the HR department was not recruiting staff fast enough to fill vacant positions.

The HR Director — Lucy Tan aimed to resolve the potential problems in the recruitment process. She learned that Lean Six Sigma could be used to improve the process.

However, she has no background knowledge about Lean Six Sigma. Lucy came to know that you have recently completed a Lean Six Sigma course. On 1 February 2021, Lucy appointed you to lead a project team to analyse the recruitment process and determine ways to reduce the average time taken to hire employees by at least 30% in three months.

Your team have decided to apply the DMAIC approach to improve the recruitment process and have successfully completed the Define phase, including analysing the VOC, identifying issues and the CTQ, developing the SIPOC diagram, etc.

Now your team are provided with a sample of hiring records. Please use the JMP Statistical Software and the source data file “BUS366 GBA Hiring DataFile.xlsx” for your analysis. You are expected to do some data computation before importing relevant data into the JMP data table.

Here is some information regarding the recruitment process of DAG and the project:

• The agreed service level target for hiring is 30 calendar days from hiring request to employment contract signed for any department.

• The HR department does the sourcing of candidates themselves and only occasionally works with external recruitment agencies on an ad-hoc basis.

• DAG Laboratory Department works on a 24/7 basis and DAG Marketing Department also works from 8 am-6 pm every day.

Question 1

(a) You have identified the CTQ for this improvement project in the Define phase. Define the operational definition of the CTQ. Recommend a suitable plot in JMP and generate the “As-Is” baseline performance chart of the CTQ based on the data in the “Hiring Records” tab of the “BUS366 GBA Hiring DataFile.xlsx”. Interpret what you observe from the baseline performance chart.

(b) Generate the histogram and descriptive statistics of the CTQ. Estimate the process capability.

(c) Apply an appropriate JMP plot and additional information from the sample data, present and interpret further insight about the baseline performance