Creating a culture of process improvement, whether you are operating an online venture or traditional brick and mortar establishment is vital to success and increased profitability. There are many tools available for defining, measuring and analyzing a business process to identify potential problems and more importantly find areas of improvement. Although several methods exist for data analysis, in this article we will review the use of charting tools.
Charting tools have been around for quite some time, popularized by the wide spread Six Sigma initiatives at major corporations like General Electric and Home Depot, help reduce costs and waste while at the same time improving quality. Armed with accurate data sets it is easy to see with the use of charting tools how processes are performing and when they are out of control to make necessary corrections.
Some of the more popular data analysis tools available are run charts, control charts, paretos and histograms. Although each has a different purpose, for example a pareto could be used to track and identify historical customer complaints with a given product while a control chart can be used to monitor the...