Continuous Improvement

Defintion
A Pareto chart is a bar graph. The lengths of the bars represent frequency and are arranged with longest bars on the left and the shortest to theright. In this way the chart visually depicts which situations are more significant.

Utility
A Pareto Diagram is useful because it graphically represents the categories and their value, and helps an improvement team separate the “significant few” categories from the “trivial many” in order to focus their efforts on an area that will yield the most significant results. Any time data can be stratified (separated by type or category), a Pareto is useful. This includes project selection, cause analysis, and location identification.

Construction

1. Choose logical categories to stratify your data..
2. Specify the time period you will collect data.
3. Collect the data on to a frequency table.
4. Draw and label the bars for each category.
5. Review the chart, using these data to focus the team’s efforts.

Information taken from  http://rube.asq.org/education/docs/paretodiagram.pdf

Example: