All Features
Eston Martz
In my last post, I told you how I had double-checked the analysis in a post that involved running the Johnson transformation on a set of data before doing normal capability analysis on it. A reader asked why the transformation didn’t work on the data when you applied it outside of the capability…
Eston Martz
I don’t like the taste of crow, which is a shame, because I’m about to eat a huge helping of it.
I’m going to tell you how I messed up an analysis. But in the process, I learned some new lessons and was reminded of some older ones I should remember to apply more carefully.
This failure starts in…
Joel Smith
Last month, the ESPN series Outside the Lines reported on baseball pitchers suffering serious injuries from being struck in the head by line drives, and the efforts that Major League Baseball (MLB) is making toward having protective gear developed for pitchers.
You can view the report here if you…
Davis Balestracci
This is a continuation of my last column, which I’ve written to honor my late dad who loved golf. As promised, let’s look at the Masters golf tournament final four-round scores for the 55 players who survived the cut. We’ll analyze and then give it a twist based on the ongoing enumerative vs.…
Matthew E. May
No, this isn’t an opinion piece or in any way a critique. It’s more like a public service announcement for business professionals in the job market, looking for a strategy position with a market leader.
Like most regular users of LinkedIn, I constantly get pushed notices about “jobs I might be…
David Schwinn
“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”
—Margaret Mead
This month’s article comes from the…
Brian Maskell
T here are three ways in which a standard costing system is typically used in a manufacturing company:
1. Performance measurement 2. Decision making 3. Inventory valuation
From an accounting perspective, performance measurement and decision making are part of a company’s management accounting…
Fred Schenkelberg
Control charts provide an ongoing statistical test to determine if a recent reading or set of readings represents convincing evidence that a process has changed from an established stable average. The test also checks sample-to-sample variation to determine if the variation is within the…
Patrick Runkel
I’ve never understood the fascination with selfies.
Maybe it’s because I'm over 50. After surviving the slings and arrows of a half a century on Earth, the minute or two I spend in front of the bathroom mirror each morning is more than enough selfie time for me.
Still, when I heard that Microsoft…
Bruce Hamilton
The last few weeks for me have been all things Shingo, including a presentation at the Shingo Institute’s International Conference three weeks ago in Provo, Utah, followed by four days of Shingo Institute workshops at Vibco in Richmond, RI. Questions at both events about assessing for enterprise…
Patrick Runkel
It’s usually not a good idea to rely solely on a single statistic to draw conclusions about your process. Do that, and you could fall into the clutches of the “duck-rabbit” illusion shown below.
If you fix your eyes solely on the duck, you’ll miss the rabbit—and vice-versa.
If you’re using…
Brian Maskell
It is vitally important for lean people to know nothing when working on improvement. This sounds like a crazy idea, but it is another 100-percent turnaround from traditional management thinking.
To do this, it’s necessary to do three things: • Understand how lean thinkers go about radically…
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 subgroup size is greater than one and less than eight?” Answers varied, of course.
In some of these…
Dawn Keller
Generally speaking, I have a problem with authority. I don’t like being told what to do or how to do it. I’m not proud of that.
I recall debating with my high school trigonometry teacher regarding the value of the homework “process”—specifically in those situations where the student in question…
Jens R. Woinowski
As you browse through lean management pages on the Internet, you may have seen reports on companies having little success with lean, or comments about how misunderstanding lean can lead to bad consequences. From time to time I can sense the level of frustration from those comments, and I…
Eston Martz
Last week I attended the American Society for Quality’s World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Nashville, TN. The ASQ conference is a great opportunity to see how quality professionals are tackling problems in every industry, from beverage distribution to banking services.
Given my…
Steve Daum
The ability to make predictions has always been rewarded. Statistician Donald J. Wheeler says that “prediction is the essence of business.” With growing bodies of data and good analytical models, our predictions are getting better.
The statistical models and algorithms behind prediction can be…
Donald J. Wheeler
Parts per million (ppm) is part of the language of Six Sigma. It pervades the sales pitch and is used in all sorts of computations as a measure of quality. Yet what are the rules of arithmetic and statistics that govern the computation and usage of parts per million? To discover the answers read…
Bruno Scibilia
The Cp and Cpk are well-known capability indices commonly used to ensure that a process spread is as small as possible compared to the tolerance interval (Cp), or that it stays well within specifications (Cpk). Yet another type of capability index exists: the Cpm, which is much less known and used…
David Schwinn
Let’s begin with yet another example of a lack of understanding of the Perversity Principle, this one from a recent The Times of India report.
“Authorities in India have reportedly arrested some 300 people and expelled 600 students in connection with a massive cheating scandal in the northeastern…
Chip Johns
Reducing waste, implementing efficiency-promoting practices, and continuously improving operations are the main goals of lean manufacturing ideology. These tasks may seem daunting for a manufacturer at the start of an improvement program, but there are many concrete steps that can be taken to…
Bob Emiliani
Regular readers of my column, as well as my Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, will know that in recent months I have posted many critiques on various aspects related to the products, promotion, and practice of lean management. Why now? The reason is that 20 years of engagement in lean offers the unique…
Michelle Shemo
As a member of Minitab’s technical support team, I get the opportunity to work with many people using design of experiments (DOE).
People often will call after they’ve already chosen their design, run the experiment, and identified the important factors in their process. But now what? They have…
Mike Micklewright
Recently, while providing training for new clients, I heard a comment from two different people that went something like this: “That gemba walking stuff is really nothing new; it used to be called ‘management by walking around.’” Admittedly I was caught off guard, especially the first time I was…
Bruno Scibilia
Suppose you have designed a brand-new product with many improved features that well help create a much better customer experience. Now you must ensure that it’s manufactured according to the best quality and reliability standards so that it gets the excellent long-term reputation it deserves from…