Rip Stauffer
A couple of years ago, my wife decided to surprise me by taking me over to our local Tesla dealership so I could test drive a Tesla. We put a deposit down to hold our place in line, and two months...
Rip Stauffer
I must admit, right up front, that this is not a totally unbiased review. I first became aware of Davis Balestracci in 1998, when I received the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Statistics Division...
Rip Stauffer
A lot of people in my classes struggle with conditional probability. Don’t feel alone, though. A lot of people get this (and simple probability, for that matter) wrong. If you read Innumeracy by John...
Rip Stauffer
How do extra detection rules work to increase the sensitivity of a process behavior chart? What types of signals do they detect? Which detection rules should be used, and when should they be used...
Rip Stauffer
Recently, in one of the many online discussion groups about quality, Six Sigma, and lean, this question was posed: “Can X-bar R and X-bar S be used interchangeably based on samples size (n) if the...
Rip Stauffer
A number of recent articles in quality literature (and in the quality blogosphere) have posited the death or failure of Six Sigma. More articles, from many of the same sources, discuss...
Rip Stauffer
In one recent online forum, a Six Sigma Black Belt asked a question about validating samples—how to ensure that when they are taken, they would reflect (i.e., represent) the population parameter....
Rip Stauffer
Editor’s note: In response to Kyle Toppazzini’s article, “Lean Without Six Sigma May Be a Failing Proposition,” published in the Sept. 27, 2012, issue of Quality Digest Daily, Rip Stauffer left the...
Rip Stauffer
I recently closed the doors of my own consulting company on the prairie in Minnesota and headed back into the wild, wacky, wonderful world of larger consulting groups, joining a group in Northern...
Rip Stauffer
It’s better to measure things when we can; that’s been well-established in the quality literature over the years. The use of go/no-go gauges will always provide much less information for improvement...