Predictions You Can Count On --Dickeson

The easiest, quickest way to find the range of truth is to use the shortcuts developed by Walter Shewhart more than 60 years ago, preached by his student W. Edwards Deming, and now taught by Donald Wheeler in his "Understanding Variation, the Key to Managing Chaos." The path to prediction is through the use of process behavior charting (called XmR). It's now offered as a part of CRC Information Systems' software, a printing MIS application. It's also in use by a large, multi-plant printer in this and other countries. You can get a package add-in for Excel at www.quantum-i.com to use on your own files.

Be warned, however. If you're still using BHRs and Production Standards from the ancient age of linear calculating, you won't like the new results. That's your problem. The world you now live in is fractal, not linear. Change or die. You choose.

You can only predict within a stable range. You can only manage what you can predict.

—Roger V. Dickeson

About the Author

Roger Dickeson is a printing productivity consultant based in Tucson, AZ. He can be reached via e-mail: rogervd2@cox.net.