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How QI Macros Came To Be

Once upon a time there was a quality change agent named Jay Arthur who worked in the Information Technologies department of the phone company. Every day from 1990 to 1995 he worked at improving the slow, error-prone processes that plagued the business. He'd helped the VP of Finance save $20 million in postage and $16 million in adjustments. But his boss wouldn't let him spend $1,000 on software to draw the control and pareto charts for his improvement stories, so he had to draw them by hand.

Having worked with everyone from the leadership team to union workers, Jay knew that he had to find a way to make it easier to draw the charts required for Total Quality Management (TQM) or he wouldn't be able to get employees to do them. The barrier was too high.

In 1995, he left the phone company to become an independent quality improvement consultant. Windows 95 and Excel 95 had become robust enough that he could start to program Excel to draw the complex control charts and Pareto charts necessary to do improvement work. First, he did them just to make his own life easier. When consulting clients saw the Excel-based tools in action, they said: "Wow, how can I get a copy of that?" That's when he decided to turn them into a product.

Why "QI Macros" you might ask. "QI" stood for Quality Improvement (Six Sigma hadn't been invented yet) and "macros" were the Excel programming language Jay used.

Through trial-and-error, customer feedback and a lot of programming, Jay created and released the first version of the QI Macros in 1997. With a simple direct mail campaign, he began reaching out to members of the American Society for Quality. He began adding Excel-based templates for every form, tool and chart he needed. Because of that, the QI Macros became a more powerful tool to help every improvement specialist do their job more efficiently and effectively.

In 1999, the IOM released "To Err is Human" which said that healthcare was killing 99,000 patients a year unnecessarily. The Joint Commission began requiring hospitals to draw control charts of all kinds of patient safety and healthcare quality metrics. When nurses asked other nurses what tool to use to draw these charts, the answer was always a resounding: "QI Macros!"

QI Macros now run in over 3,000 hospitals and thousands of businesses from aerospace and manufacturing to food and transportation.

About the same time, Jack Welch, CEO of GE, became an advocate for the emerging Six Sigma discipline. The demand for Six Sigma accelerated and with it the need for Excel-based, easy to use software to support the growing ranks of Green Belts and Black Belts. While other products like Minitab® and JMP existed, they were too complex and required multi-day trainings to learn. Again, the barrier to learning and use were too high.

Because Excel was originally developed on the Macintosh, Jay followed Excel's strategy of first selecting data with the mouse and then choosing the chart or statistic required. Because of this simple design choice (data first, not chart), Jay realized the QI Macros could help users everywhere choose the right chart or statistic based on their data. This lead to the creation of Control Chart, Statistics and PivotTable Wizards to greatly reduce the learning curve required for Six Sigma and statistical process control. As one QI Macros user put it: "I can train people to use the QI Macros in about five minutes."

In August, 2001, Jay hired his first full time employee and opened the current office which now has a staff of six.

In 2007, 10 years after the QI Macros began, Jay rewrote the QI Macros in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to support changes by Microsoft for Excel 2007. QI Macros have always supported PC and Macintosh. Jay believes in backward compatibility, so the QI Macros will work in Windows 8, 10 and 11, along with macOS, and Office 365.

In 2010, Jay recorded and put up a complete, free "Money Belt" training on YouTube (www.lssmb.com) to help people start using the methods and tools of Lean Six Sigma.

From humble beginnings of needing tools for his own use to a tool that now runs in 80 countries, the QI Macros have grown into a simple yet powerful tool for quality improvement across all industries.

Steve Jobs always said he wanted to "put a ding" in the universe. Jay just wants it to run more smoothly with less waste and rework. Jay believes that if everyone fully embraced Lean Six Sigma, it would cut waste and scrap by a third and create an unstoppable economy. That's his dream—a world were everything is fast and flawless and no one has to work in the Fix-It Factory. Given what Jay calls the "Magnificent Seven" improvement tools of Lean Six Sigma and the QI Macros, he believes it's not only possible, but easily achievable.