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Find the Vital Few That Drive the Most The 80/20 Rule

Upload a CSV, map a category and an amount, and get a Pareto chart, the vital few that drive 80% of the total, ABC classes, and your ranked priority list. Free.

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Running pareto analysis — the vital few (80/20) analysis...

Ranking categories and building the 80/20 curve...

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Sent to — a Pareto chart, the vital few driving 80%, ABC classes, ranked top contributors with cumulative share, R code, and AI insights.

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Sample Output

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How it works

The analysis sums the value column for every category, ranks the categories from largest to smallest, and builds the cumulative share curve. The vital few is the smallest set of categories whose cumulative share reaches 80%. Categories are then split into ABC classes — A up to 80%, B from 80 to 95%, C the remaining tail. Concentration is summarized by the top-category share, the top-three share, and a Gini score. A Pareto chart shows the ranked bars (top 20, with the rest pooled into Other) alongside the cumulative share.

Use it whenever you have a category and an amount and want to know which few categories carry most of the total — defects, complaints, downtime causes, revenue by customer or SKU, spend by supplier.

Not for testing whether categories differ significantly (use a categorical test), not for rates or averages that do not sum to a meaningful total, and not when every category is roughly equal — there is no vital few to find.

Built for: Quality, operations, finance, and product analysts prioritizing where to act

Typical data source: Any table with a category column and a numeric count or amount

ManufacturingOperationsFinanceE-commerceRetail

What data do you need?

Any table with a category and an amount. For example, a defect log:

defect_type (text) cost (numeric)
Scratched surface 420.5
Wrong label 88.0
Missing part 1290.75

Minimum 5 rows · Best with A few hundred to a few thousand rows across 10-200 categories

What's in the report?

Standard-library analysis: find the few categories that drive most of the total, straight from a raw category/value table. The analysis totals your value by category, ranks them biggest to smallest, builds the cumulative 80/20 curve, and reports the vital few that reach 80%, the ABC classes (A/B/C), and how concentrated the total is — the workhorse Lean and Six Sigma tool for defects, complaints, revenue concentration, or SKUs. Map one category column and one numeric value column.

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Pareto Chart

The ranked bars with the cumulative share — a steep early drop means a few categories dominate the total.

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ABC Classes

The A, B, and C classes with their sizes and value shares — the priority tiers for where to spend effort.

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Top Contributors

The biggest categories ranked, each with its share and running cumulative share — the concrete action list.

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AI Insights

Plain-English interpretation — what the numbers mean, what's significant, and what to do next.

The Question This Answers

Which few causes drive most of the problem?

Map a category column and a value column. The analysis totals by category, ranks them, and tells you the smallest set that reaches 80% of the total — so quality, cost, or retention effort goes where it moves the number.

Questions?

See our FAQ for details on pricing, data privacy, and how the analysis works. Every report includes a Methodology section showing the statistical test, assumptions checked, and diagnostics run.

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