OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

SUMMARY OF
The Rights and Wrongs of Control Charts

Submitted to: Mr.Imran Ghafoor

Submitted by: Muhammad Reehan
Registration No: SP10 MBA 086
Semester: 3rd
Dated: 31st March, 2011

Department of Business Administration

COMSATS INSTITUTE OF
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY, ISLAMABAD.
 The Rights and Wrongs of Control Charts

SUMMARY

Statistical Process Control (SPC) is regarded in many organizations as an important

element of total quality management. A prominent feature of SPC is the control chart,
proposed by Walter Shewhart in the 1920s and given a detailed description in
Shewart(1931). He suggested that measures of quality or quantity should be plotted as a
time series graph. The upper and lower lines, or control lines, are placed three standard
deviations above and below the centre line. We say that in control process is influenced
only by random causes or common causes. The various uses of control charts can be
categorized as (a) process monitoring, (b) problem solving, (c) assessment of process
stability.
Different types of control chart are appropriate for different types of process, all
production processes have their own unique feature it is useful to distinguish between
‘Widget’ processes, which produce low value items often at a very fast rate, and ‘high
value’ processes, which produce items of much higher value but at a much slower rate.
With a widget process it is common practice to select a sample of n widgets at regular
interval, but with a high value process it is often deemed wise to inspect every item. The
widget process gives data which fall into natural subgroups. The manager of a widget
process would almost certainly choose a conventional mean chart to aid the detection of
changes in mean level of quality or quantity. Porter and caulcutt (1992) described the
standard procedure that contains the 9 steps; this procedure is consistent with the
recommendations of the most authoritative texts in SPC. Authors certainly stresses the
two steps (a) put the data into subgroups, (b) estimate the standard deviation by using
R/dn. Many other authors write about SPC, and give their arguments, their writing
contain much good advice on the use of many types of control chart with a variety of
processes.
Many people are successfully using statistical process control charts. Some have
accumulated considerable evidence of frustration and failure with control charts. This
failure, and subsequent abandonment of control charts, often centers on an attempt to use
the standard procedure to set up a chart. Alwan and Roberts (1995), in a much a broader
study of control chart misuse, they found that a very high percentage of the charts had
misplaced control limits. They conclude that ‘violations of assumptions are the rule rather
than the exception’. In many cases as a result of this failure the control charts are set
aside and the potential user concludes that ‘control charts don’t work with this process’.
The potential user of control charts may have two objectives: the detection of process
change and the long term reduction of the variability, if the action lines on the control
charts are easily placed the both objectives are easily achieved. Perhaps a better approach
to the whole problem of process control would be to start with assumptions’ that three
control charts will be required to monitor each variable. It is clear that what is right for
one process may be quite wrong for another, the standard procedure which works well
with many processes , can be very misleading with more complex processes which longer

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term cause variations in addition to short term random variations that we find with all
processes.