Continuing on my mission to make Six Sigma something that anyone can understand, today I want to keep the statistics conversation going with the scaled data, scales of measurement and what they mean to your company. There are four scales of measurement in Six Sigma to consider: Nominal, Ordinal, Interval and Ratio.
Nominally Scaled Data
This is the most basic scale and basically tells you whether the information is different or not. This applies to your business in the sense that it tells you the baseline in a yes or no format. Think along the lines of ‘does your customer buy product x’? The answer can only be yes or no.
Ordinal Scaled Data
This data applies to data that can be arranged in a specific order but you cannot distinguish what makes the data different. If you are looking for an answer to why a defect is happening, ordinal data is not going to answer that question.
Interval Scaled Data
This is the sweet spot in terms of data analysis, in this scale the data is able to be arranged in a way that tells you why the defect is happening in specific scenarios. Think along the lines of you need to know why you make more sales on Saturdays. You can measure the sales on Saturdays, the specials you offered on Saturday and how many sales corresponded to the specials offered on Saturday.
Ratio Scale Data
This scale is the most advanced analytic method. When you use this method you have data that has an absolute value and when you get a value of 0 is shows that there is no correlation between the variable and the measurement. For example, you have 10 programmers and programmer A completes 20 lines of code, programmer B completes 15 lines of code. If programmer C actually completes) lines of code, then you can say that no code was completed on that specific day.
Knowing how to analyze data is a big tool in your Six Sigma tool bag. Now this is not an exhaustive list, but when you sit down to meet with your belt now you know what you need to ask and what the belts information should be telling you. When you are ready to get started, let us know and we can help you.
