Quality Digest

If you combine tough economic times with a presidential election year, you get a heightened interest in how the economy is changing. Is it growing faster or slowing down? Unsurprisingly, there are many contradictory predictions about what will happen over the longer term. You’ll find countless TV pundits pushing their opinions.

This is part two in a three-part series where we assess what information we can obtain from the various estimates of quarterly GDP growth using statistical analysis and a control chart. Read part one here, and part three here.

What is the economic rationale for pursuing lean production? Much of the lean literature is concerned with the nuts and bolts of lean, and the economics of lean are somewhat less publicized. This article attempts to redress that imbalance, albeit in a very condensed way.

There are entire books, thorough training, and certification processes all devoted to lean supply-chain practices. But within any manufacturing environment, there are a few relatively simple steps that will help any enterprise to make its supply chain more lean. This article touches on these simple measures—ones that any company can take.

Meet Betty and Bart Bickerson, husband-and-wife quality analysts who work at different companies. Betty and Bart argue about everything. They argue whether grey is a color. They argue whether tomato is a fruit. They argue whether the chicken came before the egg, and whether the egg tastes better fried, scrambled, or poached. But their relationship didn’t get really rocky until they started to argue about what alpha level, also called the “significance level,” to use for a hypothesis test.

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The information age is also the age of information overload. Companies, governments, researchers, and private citizens are accumulating digital data at an unprecedented rate, and amid all those quintillions of bytes could be the answers to questions of vital human interest: What environmental conditions contribute most to disease outbreaks? What sociopolitical factors contribute most to educational success? What player statistics best predict a baseball team’s win-loss record?

Lean Six Sigma has proven itself as an effective strategy for business success in both private and public sectors. The methodology has helped enterprise leaders recognize business processes as engines that drive performance excellence and help to deliver value. Lean Six Sigma offers a comprehensible road map, tools, and techniques for achieving superior performance.

It’s all too easy to make mistakes involving statistics. Statistical software can remove a lot of the difficulty surrounding statistical calculation, reducing the risk of mathematical errors, but correctly interpreting the results of an analysis can be even more challenging.

(ASQ: Milwaukee, WI) -- The results of ASQ’s 25th annual Salary Survey show strong average salaries for quality professionals in 2011 and fewer lay-offs as companies continue to see the value of quality and its positive impact on an organization.

The survey results also show that experience and obtaining ASQ certifications can significantly boost earning power for both U.S. and Canadian respondents.