Papering the walls with printed charts might impress visitors, but anyone who wants to get the most from SPC charting must make the right chart available in the right place at the right time. Consider the weekly or monthly quality review meeting. The right people may be in the room, and the right charts may be shown, but as much as a month may have passed since the data have been gathered. Not much can be done to address something that happened six days or six weeks ago.

Likewise, if charts are simply displayed on a bulletin board in a hallway or the lunch room, they will probably not be helpful to workers trying to understand recent process changes. Charts must be accessible and visible; they must be in the right place to be useful. Of course, regardless of where a chart is displayed, selecting the correct chart type is critical. The skill of discerning when to use an individuals chart rather than a p-chart can be addressed through SPC training, but either chart will be less valuable when it doesn’t reflect recent or real-time data.

In many plants, it is this last point that undermines the value of their SPC charting efforts. The benefits of real-time SPC charting are many:

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