Improvement Insights Blog

Every process has a heart beat. SPC monitors that heart beat and let’s you know if everything is okay or something is going wrong. Both give you peace of mind because you know what’s going on and can take corrective action only when needed.

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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“One of the things that I just sort of realized is that SPC, or Statistical Process Control, can give you peace of mind… peace of mind. Now, what do I mean by that?

“Well, every process has a heartbeat, and with a control chart you can tell if it’s beating normally or going crazy. With a histogram, with limits, you can tell if you’re meeting customer expectations or if you’re off target or too wide, all right? And so you can start to [think], “Oh…”

“If you think you have great quality, great. Put it in a control chart and some histograms and see if it does what you think it does. And if it does, yahtzee! But then, you might also recognize that it could be better. You know? Maybe you’re at four sigma or five sigma or six sigma. Could you be better? Is it good enough? Is it meeting your customer needs? That enables you to sleep at night. That’s peace of mind.

“Now, you can also, you know… I’ve talked to people who use our control chart dashboards. We have these simple fill-in-the-blank dashboards where you just type in your numbers, put in your upper and lower spec limits, and you get control charts and histograms and Cp, Cpk, you get all the capability [tools]… all that stuff. It’s just type in here and your charts grow. Now, what does that do? That makes it very easy to monitor a process. You don’t need to be an expert. You can just type numbers in and watch the charts and see if they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.

“We have companies that have used our control chart dashboards to monitor all of their… KPIs or Key Process Indicators. Now, what does that do? Well, it makes it much easier to manage the business because you know if every thing’s just behaving nice and normally, great. If they’re not, that’s where we need to focus our energy right now. Right? And then the people I’ve talked to who have helped implement this, their leadership team [says], “Oh my gosh, it’s so much easier to manage the business. We’re not chasing strange anomalies or racing after imaginary numbers. No, we know [how] our process is performing [and that] gives us peace of mind. We can sleep at night.”

“So, I want you to get this idea that the charts and tools of Quality Improvement aren’t that hard anymore. They’re actually pretty easy, and they will give you and your leadership team the peace of mind you’ve all been looking for.

“Let’s go out and improve something this week, like using SPC to monitor [your processes] and get a good night’s sleep.”