Comments on the paper 'Innovating to do more with less - the story of Lean Six Sigma in the Central Statistics Office, Ireland' [1]

摘要

Applications of Six Sigma in Official Statistics are rarely reported in the literature. This is just one way the paper by McSweeney and Moore is unique, welcome and quite important. The authors tell a fascinating story. Faced with tremendous pressure to cut production costs and, at the same time, improve quality, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) of Ireland introduced Lean Six Sigma (LSS) into its some of its production processes. After training staff extensively in the "soft" and "hard" components of LSS, two projects were launched - one focusing on increasing the timeliness of the Earnings, Hours and Employment Costs Survey (EHECS) and the other focusing primarily on reducing revision error and improving timeliness for the Retail Sales Index (RSI). In the EHECS, the time required to deliver provisional estimates was reduced from T + 78 to T + 63 days, not to mention a number of other noteworthy quality improvements. For the RSI, revision errors were substantially reduced while the timeliness of delivery was markedly improved.