Someone asked me about resources for learning how to use control charts. I have a web page that talks about quality control in general and shows some of the computational details of a control chart. It’s just a draft, but it might help.
There are two excellent and very readable books that any beginner should look at:
- Measuring Quality Improvement in Healthcare: A Guide to Statistical Process Control Applications. Carey RG, Lloyd RC (1995) New York: Quality Resources.
- Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos. Wheeler DJ (1993) Knoxville, TN: SPC Press Inc. ISBN: 0945320353. [BookFinder4U link]
There is software in SPSS that will compute control charts, and that is a nice place to start for us, because we already have a license for SPSS. The program R has a library, qcc, that produces
Shewhart quality control charts for continuous, attribute and count data. Cusum and EWMA charts. Operating characteristic curves. Process capability analysis. Pareto chart and cause-and-effect chart. cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Descriptions/qcc.html
R is not an easy package to learn, but since it is programmable, you can possibly invest in a programmer who could set up a bunch of programs in R that you could access via a web server.
There is also a large amount of commercial software that you can buy. I don’t have a lot of recommendations here, because I have not used any of this software.