To managing using data you need to find useful information from the data. One method to do so is to stratify the data. To do so you arrange the data by certain characteristics. For example show results grouped by the day of the week or by the type of customer or the meal (say breakfast, lunch or dinner in a restaraunt)
The choice of what to stratify the data on is best made by those knowledgable about what factor may turn out to be significant. This is anotother area where having those doing the work, working on improvement is very helpful. Those most involved in the work should know good candidates for stratification.
The reason to stratify the data is to make it easier to find patterns. If there is a small problem on one day of the week and all the data is mixed together it may well not be noticable. By stratifying the data the data of interest can be made more visisble (of course that requires stratifying by the right characteristic).
One thing to keep in mind when collecting data is that you can only stratify by the data you have. If you have the details with your data that you would like to stratify your data on you can't.
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