This March 20, 2025, Houston ASQ meeting presentation shows how variable control charts can give false signals and what to do to address the problem.
Provided below is a summary of the meeting’s agenda and a PDF copy of the presentation slides.
Have you ever struggled with unexplained out-of-control signals on a variable control chart, only to find no apparent reason for the fluctuations? If so, you’re not the only one!
Variable Control Charts Can Give False Signals: The Hidden Flaws of Traditional Control Charting
Despite being around for over a century, conventional variable control charts have some mathematical properties that can mislead organizations into making poor decisions—wasting time, resources, and effort on unnecessary actions.
Topics Covered in the March 20, 2025 ASQ Meeting that Address Variable Control Charts Can Give False Signals
✅ How traditional control charts can drive firefighting behaviors—mistaking common-cause variation for special-cause issues—and how to avoid this costly trap.
✅ How to assess process stability from a customer’s perspective, ensuring your quality measures align with real-world expectations.
✅ How to generate forward-looking performance insights, such as predicting non-conformance rates for stable processes.
✅ The right time to launch process improvement initiatives, like Lean Six Sigma projects, to drive meaningful change.
✅ A free, next-generation metric reporting app that eliminates the common pitfalls of variable control charting—so you can focus on real improvements, not chasing noise.
✅ A smarter approach to real-time, predictive performance reporting, enabling your organization to stay ahead with automatically updated, insightful metrics.
Meeting Preparation
Before the meeting, attendees are encouraged to think about problems and confusion with control charts, process capability analyses, key performance indices (KPI) reporting (including red-yellow-green scorecards and table of numbers management report-outs), current organizational goal-setting practices, and process improvement efforts. After Forrest’s presentation, he will solicit thoughts about these items to stimulate discussion on what to do differently to address these issues.
Copy of the Presentation Slides
I will post a PDF copy of the presentation slides here before the ASQ Houston meeting on March 20, 2025, and provide a link to this post in the presentation.