Jun 15 2024
True And False Alarms in Quality Control
The SPC literature does not consider what happens when an organization successfully uses its tools. It stabilizes unstable processes so that disruption from assignable causes becomes increasingly rare. While this happens, the false alarms from the common causes remain at the same frequency, and the ratio of true to false alarms drops to a level that destroys the credibility of the alarms.
This is a signal that further quality improvement can only be pursued with other tools, typically the conversion to one-piece flow to accelerate the detection of problems and, once human error becomes the dominant cause of defects, error-proofing. This article digs into the details of how this happens with control charts.
Sep 17 2025
Label your charts!
Charts you share with others need a bodyguard of text to be self-explanatory, avert misunderstandings, and support learning. None of this matters when you chart exclusively for your own use, but it is obligatory when communicating with a team or making a case to management.
Generating an informative, actionable chart can take hours; documenting and labeling it should take minutes, yet we encounter charts with missing or unclear labels in business documents, published articles, and even textbooks.
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By Michel Baudin • Data science 0 • Tags: Axis label, Chart, SPC