All Features
Patrick Runkel
Right now I’m enjoying my daily dose of morning joe. As the steam rises off the cup, the dark, rich liquid triggers a powerful enzyme cascade that jump-starts my brain and central nervous system, delivering potent glints of perspicacity into the dark crevices of my still-dormant consciousness.…
David Schwinn
Last weekend we took all 16 members of our family on a ski trip. It was amazing, and we are incredibly lucky. We haven’t done such a thing in 17 years, when our first grandchild, Claire, was only one month old. Life gets complex and 17 years fly by.
That experience reminded me of work my wife,…
Davis Balestracci
In my last column, I discussed how even a well-designed study with a statistically significant result doesn’t necessarily mean viability in the real world. Post-study, one must study the manifestations of variation on the result in any environment in which the result is applied—and each…
Joel Smith
I typically attend a few lean Six Sigma conferences each year, and at each there’s at least one session about compensating belts. There are any number of ideas for how to do so, but they commonly include systems that provide a percentage of savings as a portion of pay, or provide a bonus for…
David Schwinn
‘From laughing tots in Haitian preschools to inner-city gang members to top executives in global corporations, people everywhere are gathering in circles. These circles are generating trusting relationships among people with long histories of antagonism; promoting healing among people suffering…
Davis Balestracci
I have evolved to using fewer, simpler tools in my consulting and have never been more effective, as I commented upon in my last column. It made me ponder the relevance of much of what I learned in my master’s statistics program. Thinking of the most basic concepts, I decided to look up what the…
The purpose of this article is to point out a problem when using percentages for subgroups over time, or for members in a larger group, where the size of the denominator varies and probabilities are being estimated. Also to introduce a solution: adjusted p-chart scores (APC), a new way to score or…
Patrick Runkel
If you’re not a statistician, looking through statistical output can sometimes make you feel a like you’ve wandered into Alice in Wonderland. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantastical world where strange and mysterious phantasms appear out of nowhere. For example, consider the T and P in your t…
Donald J. Wheeler
Whenever the original data pile up against a barrier or a boundary value, the histogram tends to be skewed and non-normal in shape. Last month in part one we found that this doesn’t appreciably affect the performance of process behavior charts for location. This month we look at how skewed data…
Thomas R. Cutler
This is the last in a series about how lean manufacturing has affected the people and the companywide culture at Hytrol Conveyors, a designer and manufacturer of advanced conveyor systems. As described in part 1 and part 2, dozens of interviews were conducted with a wide range of employees at the…
Barbara A. Cleary
When my mother looked at the prices of new hats, studied their features, and then went home and tried to remodel her old hat with feathers or lace to look like those fancier models, I saw the value of doing things yourself—for my mother, an attitude perhaps shaped by her own parents and their…
Dawn Keller
I really can’t make this stuff up.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago titled: “How to Talk to Your Kids About... Quality Improvement,” in which I lamented about Community Hero Day in my daughter’s first-grade class and the need to explain to her why I wasn’t at the “community-hero level” of…
Davis Balestracci
I've been presenting at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) annual forum for 21 consecutive years. Maybe the biggest surprise from these two decades has been the awesome power of simply "plotting the dots," i.e., plotting important organizational data in their naturally occurring time…
Mark Rosenthal
The title of this article is a search term that recently hit The Lean Thinker site. It’s an interesting question—and interesting that it gets asked.
“Kaizen” is now an English word—it’s in the OED—and defined as such: “Noun. A Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working…
Matthew Barsalou
There are many tools available for investigating quality problems. One useful and easy-to-use set of statistical tools is John W. Tukey’s exploratory data analysis (EDA), which quality engineers can use for generating hypotheses. Tukey’s EDA provides many different methods for looking at data, and…
Mike Micklewright
Should an organization’s design engineers step foot on the production floor, or would this be too much of a distraction from what they get paid to do—cranking out new designs? For most progressive and forward-looking organizations, this is a no-brainer. Of course product engineers would be, and…
Joel Smith
On a recent vacation, I was unsuccessfully trying to reunite with my family outside a busy shopping mall and starting to get a little stressed. I was on a crowded sidewalk, in a busy city known for crime, and it was raining. I thought there was no way things could get more aggravating when…
Thomas R. Cutler
In November 2014, Quality Digest Daily published the first in a series about companywide lean cultures and how a lean journey affects people and companies. Jonesboro, Arkansas-based Hytrol Conveyors, a designer and manufacturer of advanced conveyor systems, allowed an in-depth examination of why…
Donald J. Wheeler
Whenever the original data pile up against a barrier or a boundary value, the histogram tends to be skewed and non-normal in shape. In 1967 Irving W. Burr computed the appropriate bias correction factors for non-normal probability models. These bias correction factors allow us to evaluate the…
Tripp Babbitt
In my last column I wrote about the seven perspectives that pollute customers and culture. These perspectives rule the design of our organizations. They are inherent to our work cultures and thinking. They put us on autopilot as we toil in our everyday work. The first step to change that is to…
David Schwinn
My wife, Carole, and I recently participated in the 16th Annual ILA (International Leadership Association) Global Conference. The theme was conscious leadership. At the conference, Meg Wheatley was given a Lifetime Achievement Award. That puts her in the company of Peter Drucker, Warren Bennis,…
Meredith Griffith
During the last year or so I've heard a lot of people asking, "How can I calculate B10 life in Minitab?" Despite my being a statistician and an industrial engineer (mind you, one who's never actually been in the field) and having taken a reliability engineering course, I'd never heard of B10 life…
Mike Micklewright
Editor’s note: This article discusses topics covered at greater length in episodes 19–23 of a new streaming video training series, Creating and Sustaining Lean Improvements—Integrating Principles, Culture, and Tools by the author and 360 Performance Circle, a sister company to Quality Digest.…
Bruce Hamilton
There was a time when it was unfashionable for managers to associate with front-line employees. Alluding to an old adage, I used to joke that you could not even lead the horse (i.e., the manager) to water, let alone make him drink. Division of labor at that time was a great divide. In my early…
Donald J. Wheeler
There is no virtue in obedience when we do not have a choice. But when we have a choice it helps to understand both the law and the reason behind the law. This column is about bad choices that are being made on a daily basis by the users of statistical software. These bad choices violate the laws…