Variation can (and does) occur anywhere, and professionals who are unaware of this are at a disadvantage when it comes to monitoring and measuring process performance. Precious time can be spent searching for causes of variation that are inherent to the process. Likewise, variation caused by assigned deviations from established performance criteria may remain undetected for a long time, resulting in costly repair and rework. This course is designed to help you avoid these common pitfalls of data analysis.

Course Objectives

• Recognize the difference between common cause variation (inherent to any process) and special cause variation (that can be assigned to a specific root cause).
• Learn the appropriate business strategy to deal with common cause and special cause variation.
• Understand how plotting data helps to determine whether or not special cause variation is present in the process.
• Learn to distinguish between data patterns established over time and data patterns unrelated to time.
• Learn how to study the relationship between two variables through the use of scatter plots.
• Use Minitab^TM in support of statistical tools.

Main Topics

• Understanding variation
• Types of variation and appropriate reaction
• Creating and interpreting plots of variation
  • Time plots
  • Individuals control charts
• Control limits and specification limits
• Studying the distribution of numerical data
  • Frequency distribution (histograms, dot plots, and box plots)
• Pareto principle and Pareto analysis
• Time plots and histograms
• Scatter plots

Who Should Attend

Managers and professionals who are engaged in analyzing process data in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their organization’s processes, as well as associated quality, engineering, manufacturing, process, and industrial personnel. Also valuable for anyone involved in a Lean and/or Six Sigma deployment.

This course requires the use of Minitab^TM statistical software; attendees are responsible for bringing laptops with Minitab^TM to the class.

CEUs: 2.5
Number of Days: 3