Operations Management: Processes and Supply Chains, 12th Edition

Statistical Process Control

Regardless of whether a firm is producing a service or a product, it is important to ensure that the firm’s processes are providing the quality that customers want. A key element of TQM or Six Sigma is building the capability to monitor the performance of processes so that corrective action can be initiated in a timely fashion. Evaluating the performance of processes requires a variety of data-gathering approaches. We already discussed checklists, histograms and bar charts, Pareto charts, scatter diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, and graphs (see Chapter 2, “Process Strategy and Analysis”). All of these tools can be used with TQM or Six Sigma. Here, we focus on the powerful statistical tools that can be used to monitor ...