It is hard to imagine a business without adequate quality and process management. Every good company has a defined strategy that must be followed in the fastest and cheapest way possible. According to reports, as of 2015, 53 percent of respondents indicated that their company uses a data quality management (DQM) cloud service to manage their data quality.
Companies have been adopting Lean Management concepts rapidly over the last 20 years. Some call it Six Sigma. Others prefer to call it quality management. But, it means the need to improve productivity and efficiency.
Therefore, Process Behaviour Charts, or control charts, are becoming an integral part of the Lean repertoire. They provide critical insights into problems that occur in processes, enabling managers to make changes before things get out of hand.
Here are the key reasons to adopt and use process behavior charts in your company.
1. To Detect Changes In The Process Mean
Two of the most critical parameters in a process are:
- Mean, and
- Standard deviation
This data is used to calculate the capability index, which tells us whether your process can produce the conforming product as it should.
The opportunity for improvement is where the distance between the upper and lower specification limit (USL) is more significant than twice the standard deviation.
Process behavior charts help managers detect when the process means shifting. In this, way they can take corrective actions before things get out of hand and customers are left with nonconforming products.
2. To Detect the Changes In The Process Variance
The standard deviation parameter has two components: spread or variation around the average value (also known as standard deviation) and the average itself, or processing capability.
It is essential to know if a process can still reliably produce the conforming product because if both the spread and the mean cannot be maintained within their respective specifications, it means your strategy is in trouble.
The behavior charts allow you to track and monitor changes in these specifications and make sure your process does not go off-track.
3. To Detect the Special Causes
Special causes are not supposed to happen often. But sometimes you can get unlucky, and they will appear more than usual in a short period. For example, in the case of the food industry, when you open a new pack of meat and find it is spoiled. Or when you buy eggs at the grocery store, and one of them breaks.
Process behavior charts help managers detect these causes so that they can take corrective actions before things get out of hand or before the product comes into the hands of a customer.
4. To Set Up Process Limits
The charts can be used as a reference for setting operational limits for the mean and standard deviation parameters. These limits help managers determine whether a signal or alert must be raised because something is wrong with the process, leading to the nonconforming product.
5. To Set Up Control Limits
Control limits are analyzed based on the data collected from a process, making it easier to identify something wrong before nonconformance occurs.
Control limits can be instrumental in different ways; for example, they could tell you how much time you have to take corrective actions before the process is affected.
6. To Learn About Your Process Behavior
The key to improvement is learning how your processes work, and the charts allow managers to do just that. The collected data improves productivity, quality control, and customer satisfaction.
So, these were the reasons why adopting the charts is vital for companies who want to improve their productivity. These benefits explain why engineers, managers, and business owners should consider Control charts in their workflow. It will help them grasp their processes and identify errors in the process.
