Creating and Analysing Control Charts

Once the appropriate control chart type has been selected, it is now time to put it into action. This involves creation of a control chart and to ensure that is monitored on a continuous basis. This helps to bring help to the process as soon as a scenario goes out of control. Here are the best practises to create and analyze control charts for process improvement.

Creating Control Charts

Non-Human Measurements: A control chart is only as good as the measurements that are depicted on it. It is for this reason that the control charts must use non-human measurements. This means that the measurements must be collected in an automated manner and fed into the system. Human intervention includes the possibility of favouritism and bias and therefore must be avoided.

Software: Most modern day software have control chart feature inbuilt in them. These software can be picked up from the shelf and implemented. This will make creating control charts for your Six Sigma project considerably easier given the fact that you will not have to create Six Sigma charts but merely configure them.

Real-Time: Last, but not the least, control charts must be created real time. This gives the management an option to set corrective action into motion as soon as a discrepancy is detected rather than waste time and compromise the efficiency of the process.

Analysing Control Charts

Creating control charts is not the difficult part. The difficult part is to continuously analyze them to find trends that signal an out of control process. Fortunately, the Six Sigma process methodology is pretty advanced and so are the software tools. One just needs to understand the concepts involved. The difficult part is automated and average managers can use these tools on a daily basis without any hassles.

Purpose: The main purpose of creating control charts is to segregate special cause variation from the normal variation. This is because special cause variation is the cause of out of control processes. Therefore it must be detected early and singled out, if the process needs to be made more efficient. Here is how to detect an out of control process.

Out of Control Limits: As we have earlier stated in the explanation of control charts, the points that lie above or below the specification limits signal an out of control process and corrective action must be taken.

Non Random Patterns: Special cause variation can also exist when all points are lying within the control limits. The idea is that all points must randomly lie within the control limits. In case, the points have some kind of pattern, then it is important for the management to understand the pattern and take necessary actions because the pattern could be the result of an underlying special cause variation waiting to take the process out of control.


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