Improvement Insights Blog
Is Your Six Sigma Software Intuitive?
Many people consider QI Macros to be the most intuitive Six Sigma Software. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“I left the phone company in 1995; I started doing some Quality Improvement consulting work and I needed some tools to be able to do what I needed to do. Back then I had a Macintosh Power Mac and Excel was running on that. Excel at that time had Excel for Macros and I know how to program, so I used that code to create some things like a Pareto chart. I’d be out working with a client and guess what? I would draw a Pareto chart and they’d say, “That’s cool! Where can I get that?”
“One of the things about the QI Macros is because it was built in Excel on a Macintosh, it has more of an intuitive flare to it. I had a Master Black Belt tell me the other day, “You know… what I love about the QI Macros is it’s intuitive.” It’s intuitive.
“At that time, I had to port what I was building in the Macintosh into Windows because it was a much larger market. Out of that came the initial version of the QI Macros. If I had waited until 1997 when Visual Basic came out, it would have been written in Visual Basic, but it was written in Excel for Macro language for a while. Then I had to port it into Visual Basic, but it has become super simple to do that.
“Because I work the way Excel does – Excel is like: “select some data, click a button, get a chart,” so I didn’t know any better. So okay, well… select some data, click a button, get a chart. That enabled me to automate the Control Chart Wizard and the Stat Wizard and the Improvement Project Wizard. All these Wizards automate things that used to be complicated, like picking the right control chart and so on. I don’t have to find my way through a decision tree, which most people do not want to do and find it uncomfortable.
“So that’s how the QI Macros came to be. I needed some tools, when I used those tools in front of people they said “Where can I get that?” and I took off and I started doing it.
“So that’s how the QI Macros came to be. You know, now 20-some-odd years later… 25, 26, 27… however many years it is, it has grown in terms of capability, [functionality and] robustness. We can do all kinds of things, [but] most people just need a control chart, a Pareto chart and a fishbone diagram.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight. Get some software to do it. Use the tools of Quality! Let’s improve something this week.”
