Decision Support System Using DMAIC for Academic Scheduling: ICT in Education Support Activities

Growth in technical education (in terms of #of institutes and # of seats) is phenomenal in last 5 years. Academic Scheduling preparation is a time consuming and difficult task. The complexity and challenges increases along with college size increase (in terms of divisions and faculty). We have many tools available to build timetable. The team faces great difficulties in making run time adjustments in timetable or identifying best solution First Time Right(FTR). In the recent past the Six sigma methodologies are successfully used for quality management and process improvement in manufacturing industry using. In this paper, DMAIC methodology of Six sigma is used to build Decision Support System for Academic Scheduling. The DSS system not only achieves its set goals of reduction of processing time but also narrates that we can apply DMAIC in non-manufacturing area like Academic.