EXAMPLE 12.11 Absenteeism Rate Chart

absent

CASE 12.3 Are your actions effective? You hope to see a reduction in absenteeism. To view progress (or lack of progress), you will keep a chart of the proportion of absentees. The plant has 987 production workers. For simplicity, you just record the number who are absent from work each day. Only unscheduled absences count, not planned time off such as vacations.

Each day you will plot

You first look back at data for the past three months. There were 64 workdays in these months. The total workdays available for the workers was

633

Absences among all workers totaled 7580 person-days. The average daily proportion absent was therefore

The daily rate has been in control at this level.

These past data allow you to set up a chart to monitor future proportions absent:

Table 12.8 gives the data for the next four weeks. Figure 12.18 is the chart.

Table 12.11: TABLE 12.8 Proportions of workers absent during four weeks
Day M T W Th F M T W Th F
Workers absent 129 121 117 109 122 119 103 103 89 105
Proportion 0.131 0.123 0.119 0.110 0.124 0.121 0.104 0.104 0.090 0.106
Workers absent 99 92 83 92 92 115 101 106 83 98
Proportion 0.100 0.093 0.084 0.093 0.093 0.117 0.102 0.107 0.084 0.099
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Figure 12.18: FIGURE 12.18 Prospective-monitoring chart for daily proportion of workers absent over a four-week period, Example 12.11. The lack of control shows an improvement (decrease) in absenteeism. Update the chart to continue monitoring the process.