All Features
Carly Barry
I recently had the chance to talk to Brett Warland, global director of process improvement at PolyOne Corp. The word “global” is often present in the titles of many organizations’ process improvement programs and employee job titles that deal with quality. This can convey not only an international…
Kyle Toppazzini
A s you may be aware, causality is critical in strategy execution. Without causality, it is nearly impossible to measure the impact of various strategic initiatives of a company’s overall goals; therefore, it would be difficult to tell if you were headed in the right direction, a situation similar…
Kyle Toppazzini
Whenever I write about continuous improvement and lean Six Sigma, without fail I get a comment about Toyota and its quality issues. So I decided to investigate this matter further, present the facts, and let the data be the voice of reason. I do expect the proverbial “Yabut and Costello” comments—i…
Kyle Toppazzini
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “We don’t have the data for this. I guess we’ll need to make an educated guess.” In the lean Six Sigma engagements I work on, my response to this is, “Let’s create the data.” Without fail, I get the deer-in-the-headlights stare for a couple of seconds…
David Schwinn
One of the most important events I remember experiencing years ago as part of my MBA was an introductory conversation I had with J. B. Black, Jr., a dean at Wright State University. One of the things I learned from Black was that a most important part of my forthcoming job as a manager was to “make…
Mark Graban
When I was a guest on Quality Digest Live, co-host Dirk Dusharme asked me about hesitations that some health care professionals might have about the lean concept of “standardized work.” As you can see in the show’s archived recording, I talked about how the increased standardization of core…
Donald J. Wheeler
In a class last month I was asked to explain a number that occurs in some measurement system evaluations and which is known as the precision to tolerance ratio (P/T ratio). As I will show in this column, it turns out to be related to the capability ratio.
We will need some notation in what follows…
Bruce Hamilton
When I was in production, we used the term “waves” to describe the ebb and flow of work to the factory. Some days there would be very little, and others a big heaping pile. When the waves came, we worked overtime, bumped queues, and sometimes used less experienced workers to fill in gaps. So-called…
Dawn Keller
I love product development and quality engineering. There are days when I can’t believe that I actually get paid to do this. Between you and me, I’d do this work for a lot less money. In fact, even on the days that I hate the particular circumstances of my job, I still love my job. If that makes…
Davis Balestracci
I am in the midst of teaching an online MBA course in statistical thinking. This is actually my second go-round, and I've heavily revised my inherited materials, which were well-meaning but had some obvious gaps.
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I insisted on using Brian Joiner’s Fourth Generation Management…
Kevin Rudy
If you like baseball pitching statistics, then you’ve loved the month of June. On the first of the month, Johan Santana pitched the first no-hitter in Mets history. Then a week later, the Seattle Mariners used six different pitchers to do the same thing, which tied the Major League Baseball record…
Dawn Keller
I remember a time in my career when I mistakenly thought I knew statistics—really knew statistics. It was before I met Yanling Zuo, Michelle Paret, Eduardo Santiago, and a whole host of other statistical experts. I was a quality engineer, and I’d been applying statistics for years. I assumed that…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
Although Quality Digest often has in-depth articles about the nuances of control charts, I’ve found that many beginners are at a loss to figure out how to organize their data, especially in service industries such as health care, hotels, and food. They complain that the examples are all…
Steve Wise
Selecting the right control chart starts by knowing something about what you want the chart to say about the process—what questions do you want the chart to answer? Another way to look at this is to ask yourself, “Why am I collecting data on this part?” The answers to these questions will provide…
Bruce Hamilton
I think there are no new airplane stories left for those of us who take to the not-always-friendly skies, but having been on one of those super delay specials recently and coincidentally not caring especially about being hours late (I had booked a full day of buffer as a hedge against possible…
Mark R. Hamel
Recently, fellow-blogger David Kasprzak, introduced me to the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) strategy. ROWE, created at Best Buy’s Minneapolis headquarters, espouses a philosophy under which employees can work where they want, when they want, and how they want—as long as the work gets done.…
Jim Frost
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…
Jim Frost
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.
An I-MR chart comprises two plots, the individuals (I) chart on the top…
Stewart Anderson
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.
Firms employ capital and…
Patrick Runkel
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…
Tom Pyzdek
One of the cornerstones of quality and lean Six Sigma is data: “We insist on it.” “Don’t tell us what you think the situation is; let the data do the talking.” “In God we trust—all others bring data.” You get the idea.
An unfortunate side effect of this emphasis is the proliferation of useless…
Carly Barry
I found that training to run a marathon is a lot like completing a quality improvement project. I ran my first full marathon in November 2011, and as I was completing my training, I came across this quote about quality improvement from V. Daniel Hunt, quality management improvement author and CEO…
Donald J. Wheeler
I
n my February 1996 Quality Digest column I discussed an article out of USA Today. Since that article provides a great example of how we need to filter out the noise whenever we attempt to interpret data, I have updated it for my column today. “Teen Use Turns Upward” read the headline for a graph…
MIT News
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…
James Brewton
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…