Improvement Insights Blog
Control Charts are Like Heart Monitors for Your Business
Ever seen a heart monitor at a hospital? Control charts perform the same function with almost every aspect of your business.
“If you’ve ever been to a hospital, you may have noticed somebody hooked up to a heart monitor, and it’s going [gestures]. Right? So that monitors the heart rate of that patient, and you can tell if it’s getting crazy or it’s starting to trend down, which means you need a rapid response team to come in and make sure they’re not dying.
“So that’s the idea of a heart monitor, but that’s what a control chart is. It’s like a heart monitor for a hospital (or any other business). It tells you if things are performing normally or things are starting to go out of control or… they’re doing something crazy.
“I want you to get this idea that control charts can be the thing that really help you monitor the health of your organization, top to bottom, left to right: your KPIs, your performance indicators, your production lines, your… whatever it is. You can use that tool anywhere to monitor and make sure that you’re on track and that you’re not getting sick or something like that.
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Learn how to use control charts. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
