It’s better to measure things when we can; that’s been well-established in the quality literature over the years. The use of go/no-go gauges will always provide much less information for improvement than measuring the pieces themselves. However, we don’t always have the luxury of using continuous or variables data. Sometimes, the only way to track the important events we want to track is to count them. Numbers of defectives, exceptions, reschedules, readmissions, rework rates, scrap rates… all these processes are vital to our operations, and all have to be counted. The performance of numerous transactional and other business processes can only be assessed using counts.

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