Over the past couple of articles, we have explored how an incomplete understanding of how SPC limits are calculated can lead to constructing control charts that look strange. But using some of ... [Read More]
As the founder of PowerSteering and a practitioner in strategic management and continuous improvement for more than 25 years, I have seen my share of management fads come and go, and even been in ... [Read More]
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f you’ve been to Starbucks lately, you probably noticed the fast-paced employees working their java magic as they take orders from customers in line, not at the register, so that ... [Read More]
The symptoms of leptokurtophobia are (1) routinely asking if your data are normally distributed and (2) transforming your data to make them appear to be less leptokurtic and more “mound ... [Read More]
World War III has begun. This time it’s not a war of battleships, bullets and bombs—this is an economic war. The weapons are televisions, steel, cars, and clothes. This is a war where we have ... [Read More]
Today I received a sales call from a person interested in becoming a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He had what I call a "can't do" personality. This is the diametric opposite of the ... [Read More]
In a recent post on the Evolving Excellence blog, Bill Waddell tackles one of my pet peeves: activity-based costing, or ABC. Few things do more harm to lean Six Sigma than this method of ... [Read More]
Just the other week, I had the privilege of visiting with three or four companies that were doing lean process improvement. In every visit, each company invited me into their “war room” where ... [Read More]
Have you ever met people who “do” statistical process control (SPC) only to get some screwy-looking control chart, and then text: OMG I H8 SPC! (If you don’t understand that, ask your ... [Read More]
Click here to read part 1 of this series.
Analytic statistical methods are in very strong contrast with what is normally taught in most statistics textbooks, which describe the problem as one ... [Read More]
