Items Tagged with 'control charts'

Managers in regulated industries often rely on control charts to confirm that processes are under control. That expectation is built into most quality systems, but when engineers use those charts only to document compliance, they lose a chance to study how the process behaves.

Experience effortless Quality Improvement with QI Macros, an affordable SPC tool that integrates right into Excel. Just highlight your data, choose a tool or let the Control Chart Wizard select for you, and your chart is generated automatically!

Spreadsheets can hinder data interpretation. Visual tools can enhance data presentation and help managers assess if team members understand common issues, can track performance trends, and have tools for productive discussions.

Over the last 20 years at conferences, I've noticed many improvement posters rely on line and bar charts, which aren't always effective. While some use control charts and histograms, they often miss illustrating the "before and after" of improvements. It's crucial to better showcase these changes with appropriate chart types.

A customer inquired about confidence intervals for capability indices, emphasizing their role in process capability reporting. The capability index, often represented by Cpk, estimates how well a process metric meets customer requirements.

Traditional control charting techniques, despite their long history, can lead to wasteful outcomes due to certain mathematical properties. This article examines these issues using a Minitab dataset and introduces a free 30,000-foot-level metric-reporting app as an alternative, supported by Minitab analyses.

The Xbar/R Control Chart is a method of Statistical Process Control (SPC) manufacturers can use to reduce fill weight variation, maintain centerlines and avoid rework. Here are best practices to keep in mind:

Early detection of small shifts in the manufacturing process enables you to react faster and fix the process, saving time and money.

An SPC (Statistical Process Control) Software customer recently inquired if I could discern any issues in a process, as their customer had identified problems with three recent shipments. They provided data for the customer’s current year shipments for a variety of KPI (key process indicators) in an Excel file.