This is the assignment 

You recently started working for a Midwestern hospital in the Operations Department.  Your boss is VP of Operations.  He’s responsible for the entire building: everything from leaky roofs, to warm and dry basements and everything in between.  Besides the physical building, he’s responsible for keeping oxygen lines supplied and flowing into every room (including operating rooms), making sure the entire hospital is clean to “hospital standards” and that the people charged with doing all that are well trained, and doing their jobs properly.  Absolutely everything other than medical issues and IT is his responsibility.

            He has just hired you and wants to start you off with a project that has been bothering him for a long time and that is not terribly difficult, at least in his mind.  The admissions staff (and more than a few nurses) have been complaining that it takes too long to prepare a bed for new patients after a patient has been discharged or has died. 

            He calls you into his office and says, “I know you’re new, but I’m impressed with your background in Operations and especially your familiarity with KPIs and dashboards.  I need something visual that shows how long it takes to turn over a bed.  The KPI I’m really interested in is just that: how long does it take to turn over a bed around here?  Take a look at the problem, will you?  Can you have something for us to look at, say, two weeks from Friday?  We’ll reserve the Conference Room for you.”

Background:

            When you begin asking around, you discover that you can’t just change the sheets in a hospital; to “turn over” a bed, the bed and the surrounding area need to be disinfected and other environmentally thorough procedures followed.  There are special technicians (“Environmental Techs” or ETs) who do this.  Sometimes nurses also do this, but mostly it’s the ETs.

            An ET needs training, but not a formal education.  Consequently, not all ETs speak English, but they’re still required to enter the time when they finish cleaning a bed, their ID code, and any appropriate comments into the computer system by following instructions in English.  The computer system that tracks these activities was written in 1998 and this part of the system hasn’t been updated since.

 Hello i need this done 

    When an IT person is asked for a report of cleaning performance, he/she runs a program that produces the output shown. When you ask for the report for all the beds in the hospital since January 1st,.  (Back in 1998, the report was printed on “greenbar” paper, the kind that’s 14” wide and has the little holes on the sides and comes in a continuous sheet in an “accordion fold.”)  Printing that report on a modern printer with 8½” paper causes some of the output lines to be printed on the following line. 

            You’ve got the data, you’ve got the assignment, you’ve got the deadline, and you’ve got the education – now what do you do?

Thanks