Great post. I will actually use this today when discussing data visualization with my team members. I think bottom line, is your situation will dictate how and what statistical technique you use to trend. This is probably why MR did not work for you. I think it has some applications for us, but to be honest, I never even used it that much in Quality Control charts. You may want to check out an exponentially weighted moving average. Its like a moving average, but it gives more weight to the most recent data point and less weight to previous data points. I have used it in the past to detect small shifts within my mean, which is typically what you want to know….