Many articles and some textbooks describe process behavior charts as a manual technique for keeping a process on target. For example, in Norway the words used for SPC (statistical process control) translate as “statistical process steering.” Here, we’ll look at using a process behavior chart to steer a process and compare this use of the charts with other process adjustment techniques.

Process behavior charts allow us to detect process upsets. Clearly, when we have an upset it’s important to get things operating normally again, so it’s natural to think of using process behavior charts to make adjustments to keep the process at a desirable level. When thinking in this manner, it’s natural to unconsciously insert a hyphen between the last two words to obtain “statistical process-control.” And the hyphen changes the meaning. Instead of a nominative phrase referring to a holistic approach to analyzing observational data, the hyphen changes SPC into a process-control algorithm that uses statistics.

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