{"id":7460,"date":"2025-06-17T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T07:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=7460"},"modified":"2025-04-24T14:04:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T20:04:10","slug":"control-charts-vs-heat-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/control-charts-vs-heat-maps\/","title":{"rendered":"Control Charts vs Heat Maps"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Heat Maps cause wild goose chases which lead to poor decisions and bad outcomes. Control Charts are the antidote. Here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\r\n<p>Download my free ebook, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/pdf\/Agile-Process-Innovation.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Agile Process Innovation-Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/1043482522?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Hi, I&#8217;m Jay Arthur, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Hospitals-Improving\/dp\/1259641082\/\">Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals<\/a>\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/store\/proddetail.php?prod=Agile+Process+Innovation+-+Hacking+Lean+Six+Sigma+%28eBook%29\">Agile Process Innovation<\/a>\u201dand <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/demo\/\">QI Macros [software]<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I still find that people out there are still trying to use heat maps to notice when things are shifting. Heat maps are like a snapshot of any given space-time, monthly, weekly, whatever it is, of what may be out of whack or in whack compared to certain goals somebody set somewhere.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Now, the problem is these things lead to lots of wild goose chases to go try and find why one number&#8217;s up and one number&#8217;s down, and a lot of people waste a lot of time chasing that. The antidote to a heat map is a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/training\/videos\/what-is-a-control-chart\/\">control chart<\/a>, and control charts are incredibly easy to draw now with QI Macros. Just select some data, click a button, get a chart and you can see \u201cIs your process performing normally and statistically in process control or not?\u201d Then you can decide, \u201cDo I need to do anything? Yes or no?\u201d If it&#8217;s not in trouble, why bother?<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Had one guy at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Conference came up to me and said, \u201cJay, I want to thank you. I took your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/Moneybelt\/\">Yellow Belt training<\/a> and I used QI Macros to help my company save five million dollars this year. We put all of our metrics into control chart templates and everybody&#8217;s monitoring it.\u201d The leadership team has learned to look at the charts and [say], \u201cWell, that doesn&#8217;t look like it&#8217;s in trouble. Let&#8217;s pay attention to this other thing.\u201d So his leadership team has figured out that control charts simplify their life because they&#8217;re not going to waste a lot of time chasing things that aren&#8217;t broken.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Control charts are the antidote to heat maps. Heat maps cause wild goose chases, which cause bad decisions, which lead to more rework, waste and whatever. It&#8217;s like the essence of \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tampering_(quality_control)\">tampering<\/a>,\u2019 as Deming would say. You take one little data point and decide that that&#8217;s a big thing and go change something. No, you need to look at the process and see how that works.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week. Get out of heat maps, get into control charts. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week, like how you manage your business.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heat Maps cause wild goose chases which lead to poor decisions and bad outcomes. Control Charts are the antidote. Here&rsquo;s why: Download my free ebook, Agile Process Innovation-Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results. &#65279; &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals&rdquo; &ldquo;Agile Process Innovation&rdquo;and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;I still find that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7753,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[439,599,168,140],"class_list":["post-7460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","tag-control-charts","tag-heat-maps","tag-qi-macros","tag-quality-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7460"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7758,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7460\/revisions\/7758"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}