Certified Quality Engineer (CQE) Practice Exam 2025 - Comprehensive All-in-One Study Guide for Exam Success!

A Pareto chart is primarily used to identify and prioritize significant factors, effectively helping organizations focus their improvement efforts on the most impactful issues. This type of chart visually represents data in descending order of frequency or impact, often based on the principle that a small number of causes often lead to a majority of problems—commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule. By highlighting the most significant factors first, teams can allocate resources and efforts strategically to tackle the issues that will yield the greatest benefit, improving efficiency and effectiveness in problem-solving.

The other options, while related to quality management and performance evaluation, do not capture the primary function of a Pareto chart. For instance, displaying the flow of processes is more suited to flowcharts or process maps, which illustrate the sequence of activities in a process. Measuring employee performance usually involves performance metrics and evaluation methods, not a visual representation of data like a Pareto chart. Finally, calculating production capacity is a specific analysis related to how much output a manufacturing system can produce, which is also outside the primary purpose of a Pareto chart.