Abdul Aziz Jemain

Efficient Cost Management through Excellence Quality Management Practices among Local Authorities in Malaysia

Abstract This study examines the relationship between quality management practices and the efficiency in cost management in Local Authorities. Eighty organizations participated in this study, whereby the data are gathered through self-administered structured questionnaire. Employing regression analysis, the results revealed that both employee focus and ICT have positive association with the efficiency in cost management while process management has the inverse relationship. Thus, in order to achieve a superior level of efficiency in cost management, Local Authorities need to address these three components.

Eliminating the influence of serial correlation on statistical process control charts using trend free pre-whitening (TFPW) method

A key assumption in traditional statistical process control (SPC) technique is based on the requirement that observations or time series data are normally and independently distributed. The presences of a serial autocorrelation results in a number of problems, including an increase in the type I error rate and thereby increase the expected number of false alarm in the process observation. However, the independency assumption is often violated in practice due to the influence of serial correlation in the observation. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate with the hospital admission data, the influence of serial correlation on the statistical control charts. The trend free pre-whitening (TFPW) method has been used and applied as an alternative method to obtain residuals series which are statistically uncorrelated to each other. In this study, a data set of daily hospital admission for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases was used from the period of 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009 (365 day...