Free advice

Michael Nielsen’s advice to companies introducing SPC. Issue 7.

1. Give everybody basic training.

2. Decide who owns the process.

3. Verify that all formal and informal leaders are clued in.

4. Choose clear, user-friendly, logical software.

5. Using SPC means adopting a new way of thinking. Focus on changing behaviour patterns instead of getting bogged down in technical discussions.

6. Encourage a simple view where SPC is used more widely and where the result need not be strictly statistically correct rather than a complicated attitude that discourages all but the most enthusiastic. Remember that SPC is primarily a machine operator’s tool!

7. Do not use SPC as a way to supervise operators: let them use it themselves to take responsibility for the quality of their work.

8. Try to encourage actual use of SPC at first instead of focusing on high capability indices.

9. Good places to start using SPC to set a good example:
     a. Where the workforce is specially          receptive to the idea;
     b. Where the process is specially easy to          control.

10. Good places to take the next step:
       a. Where reject rates are high;
       b. Where the internal/external customer            has problems arising out of low process            capability in the foregoing operation;
       c. Where the customer or you yourself            have defined critical properties.

If you control only the final operation in a process, you risk failing to identify expensive problems farther upstream. Remember, too, that a not capable process is in greater need of control than a capable one.

11. Finally: it takes time to change old habits. So allow enough time.