Improvement Insights Blog
Save the Turkeys!
What do you do about an ammonia spill in a monstrous freezer filled with turkeys and chicken? I used the QI Macros Stat Wizard to save $3,000,000 in frozen poultry. Here’s how:
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Last year, I had an opportunity to work with a company that handles frozen poultry: turkeys, chickens, things of that nature. They had had an ammonia spill inside one of these big, huge freezers where they keep stuff. And what they did was they had other freezers, (obviously). So, the FDA was not going to release those unless we could prove that the ammonia didn’t really affect them.
“Now, I found an article that says that [type of exposure] just doesn’t affect them because they don’t absorb anything when they’re frozen. But anyway, they took samples from multiple chickens: multiple chickens from the one that had the spill and from one that had not had any kind of spill. And then I used the QI Macros Stat Wizard to analyze it to find out [differences].
“So [the QI Macros Stat Wizard] did the F test to determine if the variances were different. They were not. Then [the QI Macros Stat Wizard] did a T test to determine if the means were different and they were not. In some cases, the good place (the one without the spill), had higher ammonia content than the one where they had this spill. Now, none of these things turned out to have an equivalency, but in general, the means and the variances were the same. That saved $3 million worth of frozen turkey and chicken.
“So, somebody got to eat turkey at Thanksgiving because we used a little statistics to do a little analysis.
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and save the turkey. Let’s improve something this week.”
