Archive for August, 2009

How many charts can you track?

August 21, 2009

Steve Daum

Most of our customers use charts as part of their work. Depending on their job, they may review charts every hour, day, week, or at some other interval. Creating and reviewing these charts is almost never a primary job. Instead, the charts are used as decision support tools; they support the primary job and help a user make better decisions.

Different types of charts have different usage patterns. For example, when looking at a chart of sales, the usage pattern is something like this:

  1. View the chart
  2. Ask this question: Are we on target, above target, or below target?
  3. Depending on the answer, take appropriate action to move towards the desired outcome.
  4. At some later date, repeat.

Statistical process control (SPC) charts have a similar usage pattern with a narrower focus. For example, you might chart the wait time between a customer posting an order and receiving an order acknowledgement.

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Posted in CHARTrunner-m, Miscellaneous, Software | Comments Off

Upcoming articles in this month’s Quality eLine

August 11, 2009

Alison Nelson

As usual, we’ve been working hard on wrapping up the latest edition of Quality eLine, our monthly e-newsletter that gives you industry news, case studies, and product tips you can use to enrich your software use. Here is what you’ll see in this month’s issue:

  • Use flow charts to simplify processes and advance learning
  • Quality Quiz: Another quiz from Professor Cleary—and last month’s winners!
  • Data in everyday life: The evolution of the minimum wage
  • Six Sigma and more: ‘Hire good people and treat them like family’

We’ll be sending it out later today, so if you’re not a subscriber yet, subscribe now to receive your free copy.

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Tips for designing your quality improvement spreadsheets

August 4, 2009

Steve Daum

Among our healthcare customers we find substantial use of Microsoft Excel. A recent survey of CHARTrunner customers found that 68% of them use data in Excel to produce their SPC charts and other analysis related to quality improvement. Excel is powerful and flexible and well suited to this job. However, this power can lead to complicated worksheets that are difficult to use and even more difficult to maintain. Once designed and deployed, a spreadsheet template may be in use for several years. Who will be around to debug an error or correct a formula that is discovered a year later?

To improve the situation requires well designed spreadsheets. Today, spreadsheets are so easy to setup and start to use – that we tend to gloss over using a design process to get started. Here are some tips to think about as you design your next quality improvement spreadsheet:

  1. Decide the primary purpose of the spreadsheet
  2. Make the primary purpose easy to accomplish
  3. Use the simplest possible sheet that accomplishes the purpose
  4. Don’t create future work for yourself
  5. Keep the data “pure”
  6. Be consistent among your sheets
  7. Favor traditional arrangements over weird arrangements
  8. Use a “notes” worksheet to document complex sheets

For a more detailed look at these tips see the following article in the PQ Systems knowledge base:

http://www.pqsystems.com/kb/activekb/questions/541/Excel+tips

Posted in CHARTrunner, Healthcare, Software | Comments Off