Theme 3: Chart Enhancements

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There are six features in the Chart Enhancements category:

A. Control limits and manual scaling on DPU charts

If you use the Defect Management Systems, you're going to love the next two features.

Adding Control Limits to the DPU charts solves a problem that Defect Management System users have had for years. In the past, GainSeeker® made it difficult to track detailed information about specific defects. A classic example is in a circuit board assembly environment. In the past you could track the number of defects in a lot of boards and their defect reasons, but if you wanted to track the location of those defects you had to decide you were never going to look at a p, np, c or u chart.

This restriction is gone. Now you can put as much detail as you want into a specific defect record. And then, because you can draw control limits on a DPU chart (grouped by time period instead of by record) you have new options open to you.

While you have a DPU chart displayed, select Display Options (either by right-clicking or through the Options, Display Options menu). Then check the Control Limit boxes in the Chart Limits area.

You'll see the chart displayed with control limits. As with typical defect control charts, the limits will be stepped if the sample size varies by more than 25%.

B. DMS Drill-down Data Table

The Defect Management System Drill-down Data Table now makes it possible to view detailed data for a Drill-down Pareto chart. This gives you more flexibility during data analysis. Previous versions of GainSeeker did not provide access to detailed data for Drill-down Pareto charts.

C. Create single chart from multi-chart

Back in the SPC Charts & Reports Module, you can now recreate single charts from any multiple chart. This saves time and gives you greater flexibility in retrieving and analyzing data.

For example you might have a desktop that shows weekly Box & Whisker chart for a given product over the prior quarter, as shown below.

Now you can right-click on the chart and select the Split… option.

This opens the Select Multiple Chart Items for Single Charts screen. Here we've selected to draw a control chart for each of the weeks.

Since there were nine boxes on the Box & Whisker chart (nine weeks of data), this produces nine new windows, each with a control chart of one week's data.

D. New user-configurable labels

New labels have been added to the User-Defined Labels screen. Now you can edit the labels for Control Limits and for all midpoint (mean and nominal) values.

E. Send E-mail as HTML instead of Text

Prior versions of GainSeeker sent only text e-mails, with the option to include charts and statistics as attached files. Version 7.5 now supports HTML e-mails, allowing charts and statistics to be embedded in the message. This allows you to present data and statistics in a more polished and professional manner.

F. Easier connectivity to MINITAB corporate edition

If you have MINITAB 14 Corporate Edition, you'll find GainSeeker makes it even easier to connect to MINITAB. (If you don't have MINITAB Corporate Edition, please contact Hertzler Sales staff to find out how you can get it.)

The most exciting feature is that you can now add any MINITAB function directly to the list of GainSeeker charts. For example, if you really like the MINITAB Six Pack, you can add the Six Pack to the list of charts in Quick Chart.

Then you can apply all of GainSeeker 's selection criteria (filters, date ranges and so forth) to extract data from the GainSeeker database. GainSeeker then draws the MINITAB Six Pack. You have the option of having MINITAB available after you draw the chart, or just having the chart show up in GainSeeker:

This example just scratches the surface of what you can do with this interface. A second example is to use MINITAB to analyze the differences between groups of data that were segmented in GainSeeker. This kind of hypothesis testing is one of the very most frequently-used statistical tests in Six Sigma Black Belt projects. (The process shown here was actually available in GainSeeker version 7.4.)

Here we've grouped data on a control chart by Shift.

While it looks obvious that these shifts represent significantly different populations, being able to throw this data easily into MINITAB and conducting a t-Test would give us the confidence we need.

If you right-click on this chart and select Control Limit Legend, you see this window:

Select any pair of the groups, and select New Charts! Then select to view the raw data in a Multiple Data Table.

From here, select File>Send To> MINITAB…

If you have MINITAB Corporate Edition, you'll see the MINITAB Corporate Edition Options dialog. (If you have the regular edition, the options below "Send a file to MINITAB" are grayed out.)

We select the Two Sample T-Test and the specific data that we want to compare. When we click OK, the program launches MINITAB and causes MINITAB to execute the command - in this case the Two Sample T-Test. The results look like this:

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