Indrani Ghosh Dastidar

Using Control Charts is not necessary for every Lean Six Sigma projects; however, Control Chart is a valuable tool in many scenarios:
Process Stability: Control Chart helps ensuring that a project is stable and predictable. It is very critical to sustain the improvements Detecting the Special causes: It identify the unusual pattern or outliers. This indicates the potential issues we need to address Quantifying the Variability: It helps team to reduce unnecessary variation by measuring process variability Validating Improvements: Control charts help us to verify whether the implemented solutions have resulted into sustainable improvements or not Visual Representation: Visual representations help in identifying process behavior over time When should we use Control Chart:
To optimize process with high variability we can use control chart To assess process stability, we can use control chart To monitor process performance over time we can use control chart When not use control chart
For a simple project where we have minimal historic data with less variation we can avoid using control charts                  If the resources are limited, we can prioritize other tools & techniques rather than control chart If the improvement is dealing with non-repetitive or one-time improvement, we can avoid using control charts Unavailability of proper measurable data do not qualify to use control charts Although Control Charts are very powerful tool for Lean Six Sigma projects however the usage is highly dependent on project’s specific needs & goals. Control charts are highly appreciated when process stability, variability & sustainability are critical to the overall project success criteria.