Fishbone Diagrams & Pareto Charts

Hi all,

Nice work this week on your Cause & Effect (CE) diagrams (also known as "fishbone" diagrams) and Pareto charts.

The three brave souls -- Ashlyn, Karson & Shaina -- who took to MS Word to draw their diagrams did nice work not only with the drawing tools, but brainstorming potential causes and contributors related to their identified problems. These charts are very useful in starting the root cause analysis conversation; it sets the table with all the possible causes and contributors organized in such a way that you can begin to address each in turn.

ASQ Fishbone Diagram Template

The Pareto chart provides a tool that helps prioritize the causes and contributors identified in the CE diagram. Thanks to all who used the data in question 11 to create their charts. There was unanimity on which set of errors should be addressed first (shipping delays). Andrew, James & Quin argue that both shipping delays and shipping errors should be dealt with, as these two errors combined account for 80% of the problems. This is the value of the Pareto chart. It quickly stratifies a set of problems identifying which small percentage of your total list of problems are causing most of the pain. Using this tool, then, we found that 2 of problems account for 80% of the error. As a manager, we want to focus first on addressing those two issues; that's where we get the most bang for our buck.

ASQ Pareto Chart Template

All of our Pareto people worked to create their own charts using Excel. Congratulations! You can never have enough Excel practice. One of the features of a Pareto chart that makes life much easier is the cumulative total curve. I've attached a link above to a Pareto chart template from the American Society for Quality (ASQ), a leading quality assurance professional society. This template is easy to use and will provide both a frequency histogram and a cumulative total curve in your chart.

Just for fun, I've also attached a link to the ASQ fishbone diagram template. Another easy-to-use template for creating CE diagrams.

Here's to a quality Halloween.  :-)  

See you on Monday.