The standards that ask for control charts

What these pages are for

Somebody has handed you a clause. Before you can decide what to buy, or whether you need to buy anything, you need to know what the clause actually asks for — and standards documents are written to be precise rather than readable, usually sit behind a paywall, and are quoted second-hand by people selling something. Each page here is one document in plain English, with a link to the source and an explicit note about which parts are our reading of it rather than its text.

The pattern across all of them

Read enough of these and the same requirement appears in different vocabulary. Almost every standard on this list asks for three things: that variation is monitored over time rather than inspected at the end, that the limits come from the process rather than the specification, and that somebody does something when a signal appears. The differences are in the evidence each one wants and in who signs it.

That matters commercially, because it means the tooling question is usually smaller than the compliance question. A control chart with correct limits and a recorded response satisfies the charting part of nearly all of these. What it does not do is provide the quality system around it — document control, validated records, signature workflows — and any page here that touches a regulated environment says so directly.

Which one you probably need

• Automotive supplier — the AIAG & VDA SPC manual, and IATF 16949 behind it.
• Pharmaceutical — FDA continued process verification (Stage 3) and EU GMP Annex 15.
• Aerospace — AS9103, key characteristics, and the low-volume problem it creates.
• NHS or healthcare — Making Data Count, whose conventions differ from industrial SPC on purpose.
• Food and drink — HACCP, where the critical limit and the control limit must never share an axis.
• Anyone else — ISO 7870 is the general framework, and most of the rest are dialects of it.