Time Tracking to Reduce Cycle Time | |||||||||||||||||||
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One of the principles of Lean Thinking is to eliminate delays which consume up to 95% of the total cycle time. But to understand cycle time and delays, you will need a simple way to track the time it takes a product or service to travel through your process. Excel helps make this easy. Time Tracking The keystrokes are:
Pretty simple isn't it? This starts to make it easy to measure cycle time or length of stay. Here are some examples:
Get the idea? Calculating Cycle Time
Then, right click on the cell to format the calculated cycle time hours and minutes:
This time format will allow you to have more than 24 hours. Other time formats are limited to 24. Converting to Hours or Minutes
Excel will automatically change this calculated value to time format, which isn't that useful, so you will have to change the cell format back to "General" or simply enclose this formula within the "Value" function. In this example, I'm calculating minutes instead of hours:
The result is a decimal number of hours or minutes:
Either of these, hours or minutes, can be used to feed the QI Macros XmR control chart template to create reports automatically as you enter the data. Case Study - Patient Length of Stay Many hospital emergency rooms are aiming to get a patient from the door to doctor in under 30 minutes. Last year's Baldridge award winning hospital even offers a guarantee that the patient will see a nurse in under 15 minutes and a doctor in less than 30 minutes. To do this, emergency departments have to be able to track the time for each activity:
I recently created a system for a hospital's emergency department to track patient length of stay. The clerk in the emergency room simply enters the date and times for each patient using the ED Length of Stay template:
Then I use formulas to calculate the times:
Then I can copy and paste a link from the times into the QI Macros XmR template, or use Excel's pivot table function to calculate an average time per day and paste that into the XmR template. Since patient satisfaction starts to decline sharply after two hours in the emergency room, I set the upper specification limit for the histogram to 90 minutes. I can even link the data to a pareto chart by doctor or floor.
Here's my point: Turn on your time tracking! Then start to eliminate the delays that are
costing you time, money and customers. Need a Custom Tracking Tool for Your Business?
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It contains over 70 fill in the blank templates such as the Ishikawa diagram, QFD, DOE, FMEA, PPAP, and Gage R&R for MSA. Performs ANOVA, t-test, F-test, and regression analysis.
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