Pareto Chart
Rank quantified causes to decide, based on facts, where to focus the week's improvement effort.
This course is aimed at team leaders, continuous improvement facilitators, methods, maintenance and quality technicians who have to choose one project from among twenty reported problems. By the end, you will know how to collect downtime or defect data over a given period, choose the unit of measurement that reflects the real loss, build the chart by hand or in a spreadsheet, read the cumulative curve, designate the two or three causes to address first, and redo the chart two weeks later to prove that the action has paid off. No statistical prerequisites: an addition and a rule of three are enough.
What you will be able to do
- State the 80/20 principle and know what it does not claim: the exact proportions vary and the total does not add up to 100.
- Define a phenomenon, a period and usable cause categories before collecting the first piece of data.
- Choose between counting occurrences and totalling minutes or euros, and explain when this choice reverses the ranking.
- Build a complete Pareto chart: bars sorted in descending order, cumulative percentage curve, reading threshold.
- Identify the priority causes on a chart, recognise a flat Pareto and know how to re-segment it.
- Verify the result of an action with a before/after Pareto over the same period and the same unit.
The path
- What Pareto's law says, and what it does not say 3 min
- Framing the phenomenon and collecting the data 5 min
- Counting occurrences or adding up minutes 4 min
- Building the chart, by hand or in a spreadsheet 5 min
- Reading the chart and designating the causes to address 4 min
Prerequisites
None. Know how to add up minutes and calculate a percentage. If possible, have a record of downtime or defects from your line over the last two weeks.
The closing quiz
The topic ends with a 7-question quiz, and a certificate is issued on success.