Statistical Process Control With VBA
Before returning to graduate school, I worked in a job
that required the use of statistical process control (SPC). SPC requires real-time monitoring of process
data and frequent additions to the data set as the process is often
ongoing. While statistical software has
been effective for me in analyzing static data sets, it has often been
cumbersome for ongoing process data as described. VBA presents an opportunity to analyze dynamic
data with little effort in loading and manipulating the data.
For my internship this summer, I will be working with
a contract manufacturer for P&G to reduce scrap in their manufacturing
process. I am certain that I will use
statistical process control. The project
that I created will allow me to add data manually, or bring in data from a
website or database. Because I don’t
currently have any live manufacturing data, I am pulling real-time trading
volume data from Yahoo Finance to be analyzed.
I used a wide variety of VBA concepts in this project
to enhance functionality and to broaden my understanding of the concepts. The program includes user forms, a modified
ribbon, arrays and charts generated by VBA.
This program opens and runs automatically at 2 pm
every day to retrieve the latest data for analysis. User forms allow the user to decide whether
to run variable control charts (for continuous data) or attributes control
charts (for discrete data). Based on
control chart type selection, the user can then select from an array of
specific control charts, and create a histogram to check for normality of
data. The charts are then generated
based on the user’s selections, and control limits are added to the charts to
allow the user to make appropriate decisions regarding the process.
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