All Features
Eston Martz
The language of statistics is a funny thing, but there usually isn’t much to laugh at in the consequences that can follow when misunderstandings occur between statisticians and nonstatisticians. We see these consequences frequently in the media, when new studies—that usually contradict previous…
Catherine Beare
Sponsored Content
Although efforts have been made to create policies that support a bias-free workplace, there is still a considerable way to go toward achieving the gender equality that organizations are striving for. Due in part to a lack of clear measurement and transparency, many companies and…
Donald J. Wheeler
Good measurements are like apple pie and motherhood. Who could ever be against having good measurements? Since we all want good measurements, it sounds reasonable when people are told to check out the quality of their measurement system before putting their data on a process behavior chart.…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
I recently presented “Statistical Thinking for OD Professionals” for the Organization Development Network annual conference. It was well received, but more important, it reignited in me a passion for the use of control charts in decision making for everyone who uses numbers, or needs to use them…
Davis Balestracci
In spite of the overwhelming odds against me, every new year I firmly resolve to reignite my relentless passion about creating a critical mass of colleagues committed to practicing improvement as “built-in” to cultural DNA using data sanity.
Will this be the year you join me?
Here is a …
Eston Martz
A member of Minitab’s LinkedIn group asked how to create a chart to monitor change by month, specifically comparing last year’s data to this year’s data. My last post showed how to do this using an Individuals chart of the differences between this year’s and last year’s data. Here’s another…
Donald J. Wheeler
What can be done when a test is destructive? How do we characterize measurement error? How can we determine if a test method is adequate for a given product or application? How can we check for bias?
All of the techniques for assessing the quality of a measurement system require us to make…
Greg Fox
It’s that time of year again. The time when eggs get nogged, pudding gets figgy, and it becomes socially acceptable to speak in rhyme. So on that note, and with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore, I bring you this timely and heartfelt public service announcement. Enjoy.
’Twas the week before…
Davis Balestracci
Those of you familiar with W. Edwards Deming know that his Funnel Experiment ultimately shows that a process in control delivers the best results if left alone. Funnel Rule No. 4, also known as a “random walk”—i.e., making, doing, or building your next iteration based on the previous one—has been…
Barbara A. Cleary
Statistics has gotten a bad rap. People love to quote Mark Twain (“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” alternatively attributed to Benjamin Disraeli), Vin Scully (“Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination”), or Stephen Leacock (“In ancient times…
Steve Daum
Capability analysis is a set of calculations used to assess whether a system is able to meet a set of requirements. Customers, engineers, or managers usually set the requirements, which can be specifications, goals, aims, or standards.
The primary reason for doing a capability analysis is to…
Donald J. Wheeler
Who can be against apple pie, motherhood, or good measurements? This is why everyone stands up and salutes when we are told to maintain our measurement systems in good calibration. But what is good calibration? By what method will we achieve it? And how will we know when we have it?
One day I…
Stanford News Service
Most leadership advice is based on anecdotal observation and basic common sense. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Kathryn Shaw tried a different tack: data-driven analysis.
Through research done in collaboration with a very large, undisclosed technology-based company that has a…
Davis Balestracci
Have you ever heard something like: “I’m committed to Dr. Deming’s approach [or Six Sigma or lean or TPS, it doesn’t matter], but executives don’t seem to listen anymore. All they do is keep interrupting my very clear explanations with, ‘Show me some results, then show me what to do.’ I was…
Donald J. Wheeler
Now we come to the sixth way to use a process behavior chart. Here we are going to look at how one group of workers used their average and range chart to improve their process. Their part had only one critical dimension, and this dimension had a standard deviation of only 15 microns. What kind of…
Joby George
Having difficulty managing quality and quality-related data? You’re not alone. Many manufacturers struggle with this these issues due to paper-based or other disparate systems being used to track, manage, and report on quality events. Walk about a production room floor, and there’s a good chance…
Eston Martz
At last month’s Minitab Insights conference, experts from a wide range of industries offered some great lessons about how they use data analysis to improve business practices and solve a variety of problems. I shared five tips from quality leaders in yesterday’s column; here are five more.…
Eston Martz
If you were among the 300 people who attended the first-ever Minitab Insights conference last month, you already know how powerful it was. Attendees learned how practitioners from a wide range of industries use data analysis to address a variety of problems, find solutions, and improve business…
Scott A. Hindle
In all walks of life, being wrong can come with a penalty. It’s also true that, if you’re lucky, you sometimes get away with it without anybody being the wiser. To understand what this means in relation to the capability indexes Cp and Cpk, read on.
Introduction
In part 3 of “Process Capability:…
Davis Balestracci
Client A came to me for a consultation and told me upfront his manager would allow him to run only 12 experiments. I asked for his objective. When I informed him that it would take more than 300 experiments to test his objective, he replied, “All right, I’ll run 20.”
Sigh. No, he needed either to…
Fred Schenkelberg
We establish reliability goals and measure reliability performance. Goals and measures can be related; however, they’re not the same, and neither do they serve the same purpose.
Recently, I’ve seen a few statements that seem to confuse the role of statistical confidence when establishing a goal.…
Donald J. Wheeler
While we may tweak things in production, we rarely get permission to conduct formal experiments with an operating production line. Production’s job is to make product, whereas experiments are what they do in R&D. So how can we learn about an existing production process without rocking the boat…
Bruno Scibilia
There may be huge potential benefits waiting in the data in your servers. These data may be used for many different purposes. Better data allow better decisions, of course. For instance, banks, insurance firms, and telecom companies already own a large amount of data about their customers. These…
Davis Balestracci
Referring back to June’s column, I hope you’ve found C. M. Hendrix’s “ways to mess up an experiment” helpful in putting your design of experiments training into a much better perspective. Today, I’m going to add two common mess-ups from my consulting experience. If you’re not careful, it’s all too…
Eston Martz
A recent post at Ben Orlin’s always amusing mathwithbaddrawings.com blog nicely encapsulates why so many people feel wary about anything related to statistics and data analysis. Take a moment to check it out; it’s a fast read.
In all the scenarios Orlin offers in his post, the statistical…
