A New Chart for Monitoring Service Process Mean

Abstract

Control charts are demonstrated effective in monitoring not only manufacturing processes but also service processes. In service processes, many data came from a process with nonnormal distribution or unknown distribution. Hence, the commonly used Shewhart variable control charts are not suitable because they could not be properly constructed. In this article, we proposed a new mean chart on the basis of a simple statistic to monitor the shifts of the process mean. We explored the sampling properties of the new monitoring statistic and calculated the average run lengths of the proposed chart. Furthermore, an arcsine transformed exponentially weighted moving average chart was proposed because the average run lengths of this modified chart are more intuitive and reasonable than those of the mean chart. We would recommend the arcsine transformed exponentially weighted moving average chart if we were concerned with the proper values of the average run length. A numerical example of service times with skewed distribution from a service system of a bank branch in Taiwan is used to illustrate the proposed charts. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.