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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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’...
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...
Donald J. Wheeler
The question “Is this batch like the others?” is asked all over the world on a daily basis. It turns out that the process behavior chart provides a very effective answer for questions about the...
Scott A. Hindle
A t the end of part three of this four-part series on process capability, Alan was ready to identify a contact at the factory who could assist in providing some context around the...
Scott A. Hindle
Part two of this four-part series on process capability concluded with Alan just about to meet Sarah for a second time. He thought he was making good progress with his analysis of Product 874 data...
Scott A. Hindle
In part one of this four-part series, we considered the basics of process capability, as witnessed through the learning curve of Alan in his quest to determine the product characteristics of the...
Scott A. Hindle
In my August 2015 article, “Process Capability: How Many Data?” I discussed whether 30 data were the “right” number in an analysis of process capability. In this four-part series, the focus is on...
Davis Balestracci
I hope this little diversion into design of experiments (DOE) that I’ve explored in my last few columns has helped clarify some things that may have been confusing. Even if you don’t use DOE, there...
Meredith Griffith
When I wrote about automation back in March, I made my husband out to be an automation guru. He certainly is, but what you don’t know about my husband is that, although he loves to automate...
Fred Schenkelberg
Spending too much on reliability and not getting the results you expect? Just getting started and not sure where to focus your reliability program? Or, just looking for ways to improve your program...
