Data Driven Analysis to Support Root Cause

Pareto Charts
A Pareto chart is a basic quality tool that helps you identify the most frequent defects,
complaints, or any other factor you can count and categorize. The chart takes its name
from Vilfredo Pareto, originator of the "80/20 rule," which postulates that, roughly speaking,
20 percent of the people own 80 percent of the wealth. Or, in quality terms, 80 percent of
the losses come from 20 percent of the causes.

You can use a Pareto chart any time you have data that are broken down into categories,
and you can count how often each category occurs. A Pareto chart is just a bar chart that
arranges the bars (counts) from largest to smallest, from left to right. The categories or
factors symbolized by the bigger bars on the left are more important than those on the right.

By ordering the bars from largest to smallest, a Pareto chart helps you visualize which
factors comprise the 20 percent that are most critical—the "vital few"—and which are the
"trivial many."

USE A PARETO CHART EARLY IN YOUR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT

PROCESS
At the leadership or management level, Pareto charts can be used at the start of a new
round of quality improvement to figure out what business problems are responsible for the
most complaints or losses, and dedicate improvement resources to those. Collecting and
examining data like that can often result in surprises and upend an organization's
"conventional wisdom." For example, leaders at one company believed that the majority of
customer complaints involved product defects. But when they saw the complaint data in a
Pareto chart, it showed that many more people complained about shipping delays. Perhaps
the impression that defects caused the most complaints arose because the relatively few
people who received defective products tended to complain very loudly—but since more
customers were affected by shipping delays, the company's energy was better devoted to
solving that problem.

USE A PARETO CHART LATER IN YOUR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT

PROCESS

Once a project has been identified, and a team assembled to improve the problem, a Pareto
chart can help the team select the appropriate areas to focus on. This is important because
most business problems are big and multifaceted. For instance, shipping delays may occur
for a wide variety of reasons, from mechanical breakdowns and accidents to data-entry
mistakes and supplier issues. If there are many possible causes a team could focus on, it's
smart to collect data about which categories account for the biggest number of incidents.
That way, the team can choose a direction based on the numbers and not the team's "gut
feeling."

USE A PARETO CHART TO BUILD CONSENSUS

Pareto charts also can be very helpful in resolving conflicts, particularly if a project involves
many moving parts or crosses over many different units or work functions. Team members
may have sharp disagreements about how to proceed, either because they wish to defend
their own departments or because they honestly believe they know where the problem lies.
For example, a hospital project improvement team was stymied in reducing operating room
delays because the anesthesiologists blamed the surgeons, while the surgeons blamed the
anesthesiologists. When the project team collected data and displayed it in a Pareto chart, it
turned out that neither group accounted for a large proportion of the delays, and the team
was able to stop finger-pointing. Even if the chart had indicated that one group or the other
was involved in a significantly greater proportion of incidents, helping the team members
see which types of delays were most 'vital' could be used to build consensus.

USE PARETO CHARTS OUTSIDE OF QUALITY IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS

Their simplicity also makes Pareto charts a valuable tool for making decisions beyond the
world of quality improvement. By helping you visualize the relative importance of various
categories, you can use them to prioritize customer needs, opportunities for training or
investment—even your choices for lunch.

HOW TO CREATE A PARETO CHART

Creating a Pareto chart is not difficult, even without statistical software. Of course, if you're
using Minitab, the software will do all this for you automatically—create a Pareto chart by
selecting Stat > Quality Tools > Pareto Chart... or by selecting Assistant > Graphical
Analysis > Pareto Chart. You can collect raw data, in which each observation is recorded
in a separate row of your worksheet, or summary data, in which you tally observation counts
for each category.

1. Gather Raw Data about Your Problem

Be sure you collect a random sample that fully represents your process. For example, if you
are counting the number of items returned to an electronics store in a given month, and you
have multiple locations, you should not gather data from just one store and use it to make
decisions about all locations. (If you want to compare the most important defects for
different stores, you can show separate charts for each one side-by-side.)

2. Tally Your Data

Add up the observations in each of your categories.

3. Label your horizontal and vertical axes.

Make the widths of all your horizontal bars the same and label the categories in order from
largest to smallest. On the vertical axis, use round numbers that slightly exceed your top
category count, and include your measurement unit.

4. Draw your category bars.

Using your vertical axis, draw bars for each category that correspond to their respective
counts. Keep the width of each bar the same.

5. Add cumulative counts and lines.

As a final step, you can list the cumulative counts along the horizontal axis and make a
cumulative line over the top of your bars. Each category's cumulative count is the count for
that category PLUS the total count of the preceding categories. If you want to add a line,
draw a right axis and label it from 0 to 100%, lined up with the with the grand total on the left
axis. Above the right edge of each category, mark a point at the cumulative total, then
connect the points.

Reference https://blog.minitab.com/en/understanding-statistics/when-to-use-a-pareto-chart
 Run Chart
Run charts or time plots provide a view of data over time. Time is on the X-axis (horizontal) and
the values of the data are on the Y-Axis. This type of chart can be powerful because it shows
changes that may be too subtle to notice. There are possibilities to track data in “real” time and
they are fairly easy to create. Run charts can show changes in time of day, day of the week,
month or year. Run charts are supportive in determining root cause in relation to time.

Example – If Customers complain that orders are taking too long you can do a run chart to see
if there is a specific time of day or day of the week where orders are taking the longest. If it’s a
certain time of day or day of the week use the “5 whys” or Fishbone diagram to get down to the
root cause of that specific time or day.

Scatter Plots
Scatter plots are good to use when You need to find out what is causing the process to behave as it
does. A simple example of this could be “rain fall” (X) independent “crop yield” (Y) dependent. A
manufacturing example could be “temperature” (X) independent “electronic defects” (Y) dependent.