Dr Wheeler's Article on Probability and Control Charts

I can see why there might be discussion of the article's points. Wheeler claims the process charts are primarily to get the process to a satisfactory state. However, that should already be the ongoing state of a process after its initial development - in which case they state the process charts are likely monitoring awaiting special causes. If you buy into the concept that control comes after capability, then at that point it will be monitoring in its day to day use with Western electric rules, et. al. I am not saying that is a bad thing, but there seems to be a little too much generalization - probably due to the brevity of the article - to clarify the point -overemphasizing the tool as process improvement versus monitoring. Monitoring is process improvement versus not monitoring, if one wants to get credit for that...

 

I got the "control comes after capability" from: From his perspective, a major purpose for creating the chart was to provide help to get the process into a “satisfactory state,” which you might then be content to monitor (if not persuaded by arguments for the need of continual improvement). But, Shewhart did some great work - especially for the technology of the time. It is not biblical, in that further knowledge has clarified the extent of its usefulness and stretched the concept with more tools beyond the original concepts to increase the benefits to the practitioner. The worst thing I ever heard about SPC in my presentations was that only Shewhart's charts are SPC. Nope...no way....they are a subset of the concept.

 

I always looked at what Shewhart did as a necessary evil due to calculation limits at the time. Consider standard deviation: It's not a terribly difficult thing to calculate, but let me give you a piece of paper and a pencil and let's find out how long it would take you. It's pretty laborious. I always viewed Shewhart as a good compromise - yes, we are estimating sigma with a range. But in running a shop with a "math guy" on staff with a pad and pencil, using Shewhart's simplifying assumption means that my "math guy" can check 10 times the processes easily. A trade I would be willing to take in light of the cost. Fast forward to today with computers and Excel and all the goodies that take the grunt work out of the math .... I never understood and still don't understand why we don't just plot the mean of the last n readings along with +/- 3 standard deviations. With n being a rolling number of samples. You move along, constantly recalculating mean and sigma and plot this against the specification limits. It's easy to do (now) and easy to understand. A process going out of control is obvious when you do this.

 

It's OK. I can do the grunt work. Look at this... your opinion, valuable chart or not?

 

You don't have to apologize for being blundt. I'm not motivated by "look at this neat thing" where my pride will be hurt if there is a flaw. I am motivated by getting a good tool out there. I do do it old school as well. Here is the same tool, but doing things Xbar-R. I also have one that is Xbar-s.

I didn't give you "instructions" so you may not have sorted out all the things you can do. Look at the tab called CtrlCht. Up at the top (on both versions) near cell H2 is a spin button. Clicking this will change the output screen to look a the different test data. If you look at Dim06, this is a simulated sawtooth (tool wear). Then, to get a larger sampling, set the cell B10 (Last n rows) to 150. Either by typing or using the spin button. So you see some cycles.

On the Xbar-R version, the UCL/LCL are pretty wide. I have the "Rolling Limits" set to yes which recalculates them as you go. You can set this to "No" and it will use static limits which are entered at the top of the Dim06 tab. Like you do your initial capability study and set your control limits (and forget them) when you start up your process. Which I don't like, because in a tool wear situation, the number of parts during the capability study runs many times is not enough cycles to start showing tool wear. Which means you get fictitiously tight control limits. So to me, this deployment of UCL/LCL means your going to be changing tools much more frequently than you have to. Which is why I added (and it may not be right) the rolling limit option. But with XBar-R, the way the math seems to work will NOT detect a sudden jog - which should raise alarms.

The running sigma WILL. Let me address the averaging a bit. On both charts, the solid blue line in center is the average of the readings taken at the time of subgroup generation. It is NOT a rolling average, it is a discrete average at that time. And the Range chart is the discrete range at that time. The raw data table lets you have between 2 and 6 measurements for the subgroup. (If you only have one, the math poops out).

The rolling average comes in ONLY in the calculation of Sigma. Both charts, in the vicinity of L10 have a "Rolling" box. What you put in here determines how many rows back you "look" in determining Sigma. So if it is set to 30, it looks back on the last 30 rows up until the current. Which will be anywhere between n=60 and n=180 because you can have between 2 and 6 measurements for each row. If you want sigma to be just the current row, you can set this to 1.

I will take some more time to digest what you said.