All Features
Walter Garvin
The foundation of lean manufacturing is kaizen, or continuous improvement. Although this principle usually targets manufacturing processes, it can also extend to the people who plan and implement lean projects—individuals that grow professionally and personally as a result of new skills and…
Danei Edelen
With multiple projects vying for your budgetary dollars, every purchase is scrutinized. With regards to statistical process control (SPC) software, companies view it primarily as a production efficiency tool, but they should expect more from their SPC software solution.
When evaluating SPC…
Bob Emiliani
Have the leading figures in the lean community walked the “Respect for People” talk? Not in my view.
Most of these leaders have only recently begun to understand and embrace the “Respect for People” principle. Although there are many dimensions to the “Respect for People” principle within lean,…
Bruno Scibilia
Using statistical techniques to optimize manufacturing processes is quite common now, but using the same approach on social topics is still an innovative approach. For example, if our objective is to improve student academic performances, should we increase teachers’ wages, or would it be better…
Donald J. Wheeler
Much of modern statistics is concerned with creating models which contain parameters that need to be estimated. In many cases these estimates can be severely affected by unusual or extreme values in the data. For this reason students are often taught to polish up the data by removing the outliers…
Mike Micklewright
You and your spouse go out to dinner to your favorite restaurant, on a “date” no less, to celebrate a big anniversary. You have been looking forward to this evening all week, and after a long, hard day at work, you’re famished and excited to eat your favorite meal. As you order dinner, the waiter…
Davis Balestracci
My last article demonstrated a common incorrect technique—based in “traditional” statistics—for comparing performances based on percentage rates. This article will use the same data to show what should be done instead.
To quickly review the scenario: In an effort to reduce unnecessary expensive…
Steve Moore
Up until a few years ago, I wasn’t a big fan of run charts. Why not just go ahead and construct a process behavior chart and move on? Well, sometimes a run chart is more appropriate for certain data structures.
For example, some data are “chunky”—see Donald Wheeler’s treatment of chunky data in…
Patrick Runkel
The word “kurtosis” sounds like a painful, festering disease of the gums. But the term actually describes the shape of a data distribution.
Frequently, you’ll see kurtosis defined as how sharply “peaked” the data are. The three main types of kurtosis are shown below.
Lepto means “thin” or “…
David Schwinn
Shortly after the death of the brilliant comedian and actor Robin Williams, his daughter Zelda quit Twitter and Instagram following online harassment over his death. How sad. We seem to somehow like to see the dark side of the world.
Even my three tennis buddies seem unable to keep from trash…
Jim Frost
In a previous article, I showed why there is no R-squared for nonlinear regression. Anyone who uses nonlinear regression will also notice that there are no P values for the predictor variables. What’s going on?
Just like there are good reasons not to calculate R-squared for nonlinear regression,…
Davis Balestracci
My last column, “Dealing With Count Data and Variation,” showed how a matrix presentation of stratified count data could be quite effective as a common-cause strategy. I’ll use this column to review some key concepts of count data as well as to demonstrate the first of two common statistical…
Akhilesh Gulati
An important concept within TRIZ is that someone, somewhere, has already solved your current problem. In other words, they have “been there, done that.” Or course, the problem has to be clearly stated, in a generic sense, to enable the recognition of existing valid solutions.
TRIZ is not alone in…
Bob Emiliani
The lean community continues to face a problem that hurts efforts to advance progressive lean management: It is the great difficulty in clearly separating and effectively communicating the difference between real lean and fake lean, i.e., lean management done right vs. lean management done wrong…
Arun Hariharan
On a recent visit to Japan, I had an opportunity to visit Toyota’s headquarters. During a meeting with some of its top executives, I asked one of them what role the senior leadership played in Toyota’s much-admired quality philosophy. The reply I received was, like many things about Toyota and…
Joel Smith
Learning to ride a bike is a rite of passage for any kid, so much so that we even use the expression “taking the training wheels off” for all kinds of situations. We say it to mean that we are going to let someone perform an activity on his own after removing some safeguard, even though we know he…
David Schwinn
Last evening my wife, Carole, and I attended a celebratory dinner for the family of one of my former students. Luca, my student, originally from Italy, brought his wife, Olivia, and his young daughter, Kendra.
Olivia, originally from Uganda, is a family physician working primarily with…
Patrick Runkel
If you teach statistics or quality statistics, you’re probably already familiar with the cuckoo egg data set.
The common cuckoo has decided that raising baby chicks is a stressful, thankless job. It has better things to do than fill the screeching, gaping maws of cuckoo chicks, day in and day out…
Gary Phillips
For decades now, the measurement systems analysis (MSA) approach has been the predominant method for evaluating measurement systems capability. Although this method is widely considered to be an acceptable and comprehensive approach throughout most of the world, a growing number of specialized…
Donald J. Wheeler
One of the common tools of quality assurance is acceptance sampling. Acceptance sampling uses the observed properties of a sample drawn from a lot or batch to make a decision about whether to accept or reject that lot or batch. While the textbooks are full of complex descriptions of various…
Joel Smith
In part 1, part 2, and part 3, we shared our blind wine-tasting experiment, the survey results, and the experimental results, respectively. To wrap things up, we’re going to see if the survey results tied to the experimental results in any meaningful way.
First, we look at whether self-identified…
Joel Smith
In part 1 of “Blind Wine,” we introduced our blind wine-tasting experimental setup, which included some survey questions asked ahead of time of each participant. In part 2 we looked at the results of that survey. Here we’ll examine how well the survey results align with the experimental results.…
Joel Smith
In part 1, we introduced our blind wine-tasting experimental setup, which included some survey questions asked ahead of time of each participant.
The four questions asked were: 1. On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your knowledge of wine? 2. How much would you typically spend on a bottle…
Davis Balestracci
I was teaching a class and asked participants to create a control chart of an indicator that was important to them. A lab supervisor presented me with a chart on the number of procedures her department performed and told me that it wasn’t very useful.
She wanted to use the chart for staffing…
Joel Smith
Already relaxed on his first day in Napa, Brutus and his wife, Suzy, decide to visit their favorite winery just before lunch to taste its new Cabernet Sauvignon. The owner recognizes them as they walk in the door and seats them on the patio overlooking the vineyard. Two glasses appear, and as the…