By the time you are reading this, you will have made your New Year’s resolutions, and I will have already broken mine. But I have an idea for a resolution that you might be interested in keeping, and one that could make your New Year happy and profitable. It is something that most Black Belts I talk to have never heard of. Before we get there, we need to talk about another powerful tool, with which you may be familiar.

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is an elegant procedure—simple, economical, and powerful.We have this research question:

“Which of the four materials being considered for making a gear has the best wear characteristic?”

This will lead to the statistical question, “Which of the five materials has the highest average wear?” (I’ll discuss another statistical question—about the dispersion—in next month’s column.)

We make up eight gears out of each of the five materials and run them on our wear tester (on which, of course, we have performed our measurement system analysis and determined acceptability). You can get the data here.

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