Pareto Analysis: This is a technique that helps determine which tasks make the most overall impact. This uses the Pareto Principal, which is also known as the 80/20 rule. It  translates to 20% of the work done generates 80% of the benefit of doing the entire process or job.

Broken down:

• 20% of your products or services account for 80% of customer complaints
• 20% of possible causes account for 80% of delays in the schedule
• 80% of your profits come from 20% of your product or services
• 80% of your company’s revenue is produced by 20% of your sales staff

Pareto Chart: This is a vertical bar chart that helps you automatically see by the descending order of the height of the bar and how to prioritize the problem. This can help in analyzing issues and identifying root causes.

Flowcharts: These are great and can be used in process mapping. Flow charts give a visual of work processes. Anyone can quickly see how and if there are duplicate efforts being done or what part of the process doesn’t offer value to the end product.

Check Sheets: These are used to collect data and keep an organized list of data.

Histograms: These are to quickly find variation in an existing process. The spikes in the histograms would show the variation. To create a histogram you need to:

• Collect the data having to do with the issue
• Prioritize the data
• Assign categories
• Create a bar chart
• Fill in counts and categories

Cause and Effect Diagrams: Also known as the fishbone or Ishikawa Diagram, these are used when a company team is involved in problem solving.  Brainstorming is a big component used for filling in the possible causes and effects. The cause and effect diagrams can be used in the service, manufacturing, or process steps, and any category that you need to visually see what would otherwise be a concept or verbal acknowledgement of a problem.

Learn more about these tools through one of our Six Sigma training classes! For more information on our Six Sigma training courses or services, visit 6sigma.com.

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Check sheets are a tool with a lot of unrealized potential, at least in the way they’re being used in various organizations around the world. While many people see them as nothing more than a checklist that lets you verify that a process has been carried out step by step with perfect accuracy, there is a lot more that a proper check sheet can do for you. Mastering their use as early as possible in your leadership can be a great boost to the productivity of the organization, and learning how to use the different types of check sheets correctly can easily transform the whole way you’re doing your work.

Collecting Data for Future Analysis

By far one of the greatest benefits of a good check sheet is that it can allow you to easily collect a lot of data for statistical analysis. There are several types of check sheets that have been specifically designed for this purpose, actually, and knowing the specific application and benefits of each one can be a tremendous boost to your productivity.

For example, if you’re frequently facing specific issues in your processes and you don’t know where they are coming from, you can use one of the several types of defect-related sheets to get an additional insight into that. Check sheets can be very powerful in determining things like the root cause of a problem, its original source, as well as the frequency at which specific problems tend to manifest themselves within your organization.

The defect type sheet can actually be of great use to companies that frequently deal with certain defects, as they can provide you with a direct link between the occurrences of these problems and other surrounding factors. Every little detail will float to the surface, no matter how irrelevant it might have seemed at first.

So for example, if you’re dealing with an issue that only presents itself at a certain time, it might not be too obvious with regular analytical means. But when you’ve stored all test data in a check sheet, you can start going through it to look for links between specific data points. When you use the right statistical analysis tools to work with the data, those connections should become pretty obvious.

Making Sense of Your Data Collection

A big problem in modern statistical analysis in large companies is that a lot of data is being collected without a clear reason for doing so. Businesses end up investing a lot into infrastructure and collection practices for information that they ultimately may not really need. A check sheet can be great for shedding some light onto the way you’re collecting your information, and keeping the main reason for that collection at the forefront.

The very structure of a check sheet makes it pretty clear why the data within it was being collected in the first place, which is of great benefit to organizations that work with lots of data collection systems. Proper statistical analysis requires you to identify where certain data points came from and why you have them in the first place, and check sheets are one of the best tools for making those systems more rigid and structured.

Of course, using a check sheet alone is no guarantee that your data collection will actually be as sensible as you need it to be, and it’s still up to you to ensure that you’re correctly measuring the different variables that play into this. But it goes a lot towards preventing simple mistakes and allowing you to focus more on the actual data collection instead of working on improving your tools themselves.

Conclusion

Check sheets are tool with multiple powerful applications, and they are one of the best tools around when it comes to working with complex data sets and ensuring that you can perform statistical analysis easily and with no issues. They alone are not enough to ensure that you prevent any issues from occurring in your data collection practices, but they can help you make a lot more sense of the data you’re gathering, and its purpose for your current analysis. Once you’ve properly mastered them, the sky is the limit to how useful they can be.

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The check sheet is an incredibly powerful and versatile tool that sees a lot of use in lean organizations. It can be easily adapted to a number of different contexts, and mastering its use can lead to great results in terms of increase in your productivity and the accuracy of each operation performed by the company. To accommodate the different popular use cases for the tool, four general common check sheet types have been created over time. It’s important to understand the specific intended use of each one, so that you’ll know how to pick the most appropriate tool for any given situation.

1. Process probability distribution check sheet

A check sheet can be very useful for getting some preliminary frequency distribution data while you’re measuring a process and collecting information about its performance. The main point of the sheet is to give you a visual representation of the probabilistic distribution of certain factors in the execution of the process, something which can become very clear and noticeable with a quick glance at a process probability distribution sheet. An important point when working with this type of sheet is to set the appropriate upper and lower limits according to the specification. This will allow you to immediately identify outliers in the data and figure out if a specific area needs extra adjustment.

2. Defect type sheet

When dealing with defects in your processes, it’s a good idea to be able to categorize them according to factors like defect type and occurrence frequency. The defect type sheet is a simple type of check sheet used to mark the occurrence of a specific defect, allowing you to easily count them later on. That way, you can just plug the data into a statistical analysis tool and you’ll get an easy overview of the current state of defects in your project. If a particular problem is coming up more often than others with a noticeably greater frequency, this is a great tool to point that out.

3. Defect location sheet

Similar to the above, but focused specifically on tracking the location where different defects occur. This can be an extremely powerful tool when combined with the defect type sheet, and it’s not uncommon to see both used alongside each other in organizations during phases of seeking out and eliminating causes of defects. When it comes to simple, but powerful statistical tools that can help you get the full picture of your current situation, combining a defect location sheet with a defect type sheet can give you a lot of useful information with relatively little effort. Of course, it’s up to you to actually apply proper statistical analysis methods to make something useful with that data, but at least you have access to the raw data in the first place.

4. Defect cause sheet

The defect cause sheet tracks exactly what its name implies what caused each defect in your process, using the same format as the Defect type sheet above. This is not always critical information, depending on what exactly you’re looking for, but if you’re running root cause analysis or something along those lines, the information collected from a defect cause sheet can be handy down the road. Just make sure that you have an adequate process in place for tracking the actual cause of each issue, because the fundamental design of the defect cause sheet doesn’t give you any capability to detect and correct errors.

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