From Ascgroup

ASC has always agreed with Deming's Total Quality Management philosophy that trends are more important than snapshots.
Look at the following example, where performance for a 1 year period is selected:

Note the raw results for 2 different functional Annexes (Sections):

Selecting the Mean ["Stat Line (Means)"] which is the equivalent of a snapshot or average, we see that Section 3 could appear to be outperforming Section 8:

If instead, we select the Trend ["Stat Line (Regression)"], we see that Section 8 is showing a rather strong positive improvement, while the performance of Section 3 is declining:

As a Manager, one should be more concerned with Section 3's performance. Section 8 started weaker, ran into some trouble, and then appears to have "righted the ship" over the course of the year. Section 3 started stronger, but has shown a continued decline in performance since. This in spite of the fact that if one were only looking at the results for the year (the snapshot or average), one could conclude that Section 3 performance "appears" significantly stronger. ASC subscribes to the philosophy that all views should be considered (and builds this capability into SeeSOR), but considerable "weight" (and thus attention) should be paid to performance over time - that result tells a better story of performance than a snapshot or average.