We have module four, lecture two. Control charts. So, what are control charts?

Control charts,
well they start to look like a run chart. So it's a quality control tool. Quality
improvement tool,
quality management tool. So whether we're going to
look at data over time again. But we're going to add a few more things. We have the
mean in here. We're also going to add two more
mathematically calculated lines. There are a number of different
kinds of control charts to use. And what that means is we've
used different ways to calculate these lines called the upper control
limit and the lower control limit. And depending on what kind of data we're
looking at, what kind of processes we're looking at, we'll have just
a little bit different formula to look at these two lines, the upper
control limit and the lower control limit. What these things mean,
is that if our process is working right, it's just between these
two lines right here. If you put your car on cruise control,
you'll notice that when you go uphill, the car might
slow down a half a mile an hour, or a mile an hour, or two miles an hour. And then
you're going downhill,
and your car is working real hard not to go over that speed limit
that you've put on your cruise control. And it might creep up an extra mile,
maybe an extra two miles an hour over. But it's not going to go more than
a mile or two away from, mile or two per hour away from that original
number that you put in there. So if you put in,
we're going to drive 60 miles an hour. Sometimes you might be
driving 59 miles an hour, or sometimes you might be driving 61 miles
an hour, but that's close enough. There's that little
variation that takes place. So we say that with the upper and
lower control limits, if we're driving anywhere between 58 and
62 miles per hour, we know that this cruise control we
have on this car will always do that. So, it's operating within
its control limits. It's working the way it's supposed to. If all of a sudden this
thing speeds up
to 75 miles an hour, something's wrong. It's outside the control limits. Over dra,
somehow dropped down to 40 miles
an hour, it's outside the control limits. We would expect it to always be
between 58 and 62 miles an hour. When we set it on the mean, 60 miles an hour, we'd
expect it
to be between those two numbers. So, when a process is moving along, something
we're doing out there in the
world is moving along just fine, there's just gonna be some little variation
like that, pretty much anything we do. You're gonna go for a walk, you know,
part of the time you walk a little slower, a little faster. It's okay, you have
about an average
kinda, you know, pace that you walk, like a running example
we looked at before. We have our, our grocery bill for our house, is about the same
every week. You know, we may have a party one time and
boom, you know, it spikes up here. Or, we're on vacation for
a few days and our grocery bill, for household items at least,
is way lower than it usually is. And most of the time, it's going
to be about this kind of a number, around a little varying there somewhere. So
that's what this is taking about the
upper and lower control limits say, and when we mathematic, matically calculate
the distance from the mean, we say these control limits, everything in that process
should be working within those two lines. If it goes outside those two lines, then
we have to take a look at
that to see what's going on. This dot right here is out of control. It says,
something weird happened here. All the other dots are within
our control limits, it says the process is working fine, you
don't need to bother with anything at all. An out of control point says that
something weird happened here. So we need to do something
different with this. We need to take a look and
see what happened there. Examples of this. We may have a personnel policy that
gets put in place because one person, one time, did some weird thing that nobody
ever thought anybody would ever do. But that one person did this. And so, most of
the time, everybody
in the organization is, you know, kinda working along at kinda this,
this rate. Everything's going fine. And one time, things just dip really low
because somebody did something really weird that nobody ever would've imagined. Now
we have a personnel
policy that gets put in place that everybody has to live by for
the next 85 years in the organization because one person did
something weird one time. That means that this out of
control thing that happened, somebody dealt with that wrong. It tried to change
everything
because of one thing. If we have one control point like
this that goes outside the limits, you just step in and
do one thing about that. So with that person that did the wrong
thing, you just go talk to them and straighten things out somehow. Maybe they made
a mistake because they
didn't have the training they needed, they didn't have the tools they needed. Maybe
they just made a mistake because
they were just stupid that day. Who knows what happened along the way. We just deal
with that one incident all on
its own, you don't change everything for everybody based on that
one weird little incident. So that's called,
that's called special cause of variation. We deal with those just individually. An
example of that
W Edwards Deming was a person that went to Japan after World War II. MacArthur
brought Deming to
help him build some radios. After World War II, MacArthur went to
world, went to Japan to rebuild Japan, and he realized they have to communicate
with everybody in the country. The best way to do that,
it's gonna give everybody a radio and she, how to get radios to everybody,
well were gonna have to make them and give them to everybody. How are we gonna do
that well? Oh, well, let's bring this guy over that
kinda knows about some of this stuff, how to do things well,
called W Edwards Deming. He came over and helped MacArthur
get those radios out to everybody, get good ones made, get them made fast,
get them out to everybody. Well Deming then stayed in
Japan to help other industries. MacArthur said help us with some
other industries around here. And we have to rebuild this industry,
and that industry. The auto industry, the clothing industry,
we have to build all these other industries, let's help
rebuild those industries. One of the people who was in
a lecture that Deming was giving came up after the lecture and
said hey I have a factory that's just right down the street here a little ways,
a clothing manufacturing operation. Could you just come and take a look at
a problem that we're having down there? You have a minute to do that? And Deming
said well yeah,
you know, got the afternoon free, let me come, come down there with you and
we'll see what that's all about. They walked down to this factory. They went up to
that little catwalk
around that top of the factory. Looked down over the factory, a bunch of people
sitting down
there sewing clothes together. Deming said,
well everything looks pretty good here. You've got a bunch people
down there working well. Everything is going great. Looks like you got nice,
new equipment down there. What seems to be the problem? CEO says, you know,
when we send our clothes out a lot of the times when people open up the boxes of
clothing, we ship them all over the world. People open up the boxes of clothing.
When they take them out,
the clothes are all falling apart. So we need to solve that problem. Deming said,
have you done anything about that? Here's what the trouble was. The CEO said yes,
there was one
of these little dots right here. This out of control piece like
on this slide that we have. CEO said yes, we realize wait a second,
our clothes are falling apart because we're one of the factories that, you know,
did not get damaged too badly in the war. And, we just have all of the equipment.
We need new equipment. You know, we're good managers. Deming said, who is involved
in that? The CEO said, well, me, and the executive
group, we went up in the board room area up here and talked about this and
decided new equipment. So, we put all new equipment in. Demming said, yeah, I see
that,
it's nice equipment. That solve your problem? The CEO said, nope,
it didn't solve it at all. Deming said, well, so,
then what did you do? Anything else? Well, yeah, of course, we did. We realized,
oh,
as the executive group again, sitting in the board room around the
executive table there, said wait a minute. How dumb can we be? We give people new
equipment,
we have to give them training. So we shut down the whole place for
a few days and gave everybody training
on the new equipment. And we put them back to work. Deming said, did that fix
things? No. CEO says not at all. Deming said well what are you doing now? Are you
doing anything about it now? CEO said yes. We've realized that these people
working here have been around here for a long time. We just need to get rid of all
of them and
bring in younger, newer, more trainable employees. So we're getting ready to
bring a whole new group in. We're gonna get rid of all these
people and bring new people in. Deming said, wait. Have you talked to anybody
about what's going on besides the people in the board room? Like any of the people
sitting down
there on the factory floor, and the CEO said why would we do that? Deming said
let's go ask them. We went down the little stairs
down to the factory floor, and went up to the first person sitting
at the sewing machine and said, hey I understand your clothes fall apart. They do
fall apart sometimes. They don't fall apart all the time,
but once in a while they do. There are certain shipments we send out,
they fall apart. Really, but
most of the time they're pretty good? Yeah, most of the time,
they're pretty good. Do you have any idea why some of
the clothes fall apart, just occasionally? Of course, we do. We all know why. Well,
great, tell me why. Okay, this sewing machine
person says to Deming, we have a big warehouse full of old thread
that we're trying to get rid of. So we use good new thread
almost all the time, but occasionally, they'll bring some of
the old thread out here for two or three days to just try and
use some of it up. So we have that old thread in here, and
we have some here right now, look at this. [SOUND] That's not gonna
hold clothes together. I don't spend my day sewing clothes, I spend my day
threading
this machine all the time. This thread will never
hold clothes together. We just need to get rid of all that
old thread, we never need to use that. Pretty simple solution. It was an out of
control element here,
one of these pieces that, a special cause. Once in awhile,
we were using the old thread, and those shipments of clothing were
the ones that were falling apart. So again, looking at a single chart where
we just plot some data along the way here, we find a special cause of a problem
instead of trying to change everything. We can just say that clothes fall apart,
we need new machines. We don't need new machines. You find out what's going on. Oh,
it's only happening on these days. Why is it only happening on those days? Because
those are the days
we use this old thread. We stop using metal thread,
we don't have the problem again, and we don't have those points that
go outside of our control limits. So again, we're just looking at some data
over time, and instead of just a simple run chart that shows how things move over
time, what we're looking at is, oh, and we can mathematically calculate to say
should they be moving that much over time. We don't wanna put our car
cruise control on 60 and have that drive us anywhere between 45 and
80. That's not working. That's we want it different than that. We want some process
in place that's
gonna keep it where it should be. This cruise control should some
how keep us between 58 and 62. You may have a car that keeps
you somewhere between 59 and a half, and 60 and a half. And if that's what that car
operates at,
which you probably paid more money for that car, then that's great too. But we just
know that it should never then
go higher or lower than those numbers. Special cause of variations what
we've been talking about and then there's common cause of variation. Common cause
just that everyday there's
just little differences in what we do. Upper and lower control limits
are what we're going to look at. This process is stable,
it's working the way it should. And we don't need to go into anything at
all about it if we decide that, you know, we don't want a cruise control that takes
us between 58 and 62 miles an hour. We want a cruise control that takes us
between 59 miles per hour and 60 and a half miles per hour. We need to completely
change this cruise control. Put a different one in there, a new
system, we have to change everything. So, that's what we look at with,
with common cause of variation. This process finds working
within these limits. Well, those limits aren't good enough. We need to bring them
in tighter. Okay, that's a whole process
of improvement issue, different than special cause of variation. There's one time
thing
happening weird someplace. We go deal with that one special thing. Common cause of
variation, and
special cause of variation.