Improvement Insights Blog

Automating Decision Trees to Collapse The Control Chart Learning Curve

Words like “variable” and “attribute” confuse new students of quality improvement. But they need to know that to choose the right control chart using a decision tree don’t they? Not if you automate chart selection for them. Here’s how I did it:



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

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I got started back in 1990, and that’s when I learned about control charts. Then I started trying to teach people about control charts… guess what? You start talking about ‘variable’ and ‘attribute’ and ‘sample sizes’ and you can watch everybody’s eyes slowly glaze over; it’s just fascinating to watch.

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Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma.

You Don’t Need Formulas or Decision Trees

You don’t need to know Six Sigma Formulas or decision trees to make improvement. Here’s why:

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Agile Process Innovation; Hacking Lean and Six Sigma for Results.”

“Back when I got started in Quality (and maybe many of you), we had to learn formulas to calculate things for control charts and whatever. I spent five days in a control chart class learning how to calculate the formulas for every control chart manually. Now, that did not really teach me anything about the distributions underlying them, it taught me how to calculate them manually. What they didn’t tell us in that class is software can do that for you.

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Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights.