Reading charts and reports
Pareto chart
- Reading charts and reports
Definition
A bar chart with categories sorted from largest to smallest, plus a line showing the cumulative percentage, so the few biggest contributors stand out.
For your role
Choose your role to see what this term means in your work.
Why it matters
It shows where to focus: the few causes, products or customers that account for most of the total.
Where it is used
Quality reviews, complaint analysis and customer concentration analysis. Used by quality engineers, operations managers, data analysts and sales leaders.
How to calculate it
Cumulative % for a category = running total up to that category ÷ grand total × 100
Worked example
Raket Parts B.V. invoiced €52,965,533 to 414 customers from January to September 2025. Sorted by revenue, the top 83 customers (20%) bring 83.3% of it, and the top 10 alone bring 74.7%. A Pareto chart makes that concentration risk visible at once.
Raket Parts B.V. is a fictional company created for Insyt.