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Minitab LLC
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efore Michael Mercer established his consulting company, he accumulated more than 30 years of quality improvement experience at 3M. That experience led him to develop a deep trust in the power of Minitab Statistical Software. He began using one of the earliest mainframe computer versions to…
Steven Ouellette
I know we have been talking about statistics a lot in my last few articles, but recent reader comments have prompted me to think more about why doing statistics properly matters. Come with me, dear reader, on a journey to find out why you should embrace, and not run screaming from, your inner…
Minitab LLC
Gold'n Plump Poultry provides chicken products to stores, delicatessens, and restaurants in 40 states. Commitment to process excellence has helped the company thrive even in tough times, and Minitab Statistical Software has provided the powerful tools they needed to analyze quality data. But the…
Mike Richman
A recent article appearing in the Quality Digest Daily e-newsletter (“Why Lean? Why Now?” by Dean Bliss http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/health-care-news/why-lean-why-now.html) discusses the value of lean in a health care setting. In his editorial, Bliss writes about the manufacturing origins…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last year I discussed the problems of transforming data prior to analysis (see my August 2009 column, “Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?,” my September 2009 column, “Transforming the Data Can Be Fatal to Your Analysis,” and my October 2009 column,“Avoiding Statistical Jabberwocky.”) There I…
Jon Miller
People can make plenty of mistakes when launching a lean enterprise transformation. Interestingly, many of these mistakes are similar if not identical to those made by entrepreneurs when starting a business. Perhaps these mistakes are generic enough to be widely applicable and not specific to lean…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Sometimes it’s interesting to watch trends develop from the relatively safe perch of business media. A press release from Aveta Business Institute last week drew my attention because it wasn’t doing what 99.9 percent of all press releases do: selling something. Instead of announcing a new product,…
Aly Fields
As my quest for knowledge and understanding of the real world continues, I decided to meet with an old professor of mine. I can remember almost every professor I ever had boasting about mentoring former students, so I figured my professor would be delighted to help me out. I am smart, hardworking…
Steven Ouellette
Throughout the last couple of articles, I have explained and illustrated that understanding the random sampling distribution (RSD) of a statistic is key to understanding the entire basis of inferential statistics. Which is just a fancy way of saying “avoiding career-terminating decisions.” This…
Aly Fields
Editor’s note: Several weeks ago, a young woman by the name of Aly Fields contacted us wanting to learn more about “quality” in general and Six Sigma in particular. A recent college graduate, Aly had taken it upon herself to earn a Six Sigma Yellow Belt. Why? Read her own words below. What…
Mark R. Hamel
I recently experienced the pain associated with coaching a team with poor chemistry. It happened within a kaizen event team, so the pain was finite, being that a kaizen event is a rapid improvement of a limited process area. It was, however, an opportunity to learn a few team-formulation lessons,…
Donald J. Wheeler
In my August column, “How to Turn Capability Indexes Into Dollars,” and my September column, “The Gaps Between Performance and Potential,” I showed how to convert capability indexes into the effective cost of production and use (ECP&U), and how to use these costs to quantify the payback for…
Tripp Babbitt
Systems thinking requires a massive change in the way organizations design and manage work. Old thinking must be flushed out so that new and better thinking can replace it. The outdated functional design of organizations according to the type of work performed needs an overhaul. Frederick Taylor,…
Davis Balestracci
I attended a talk in 2006 given by a world leader in quality that contained a bar graph summary ranking 21 U.S. counties from best to worst (see figure 1). The counties were ranked from 1 to 21 for 10 different indicators, and these ranks were summed to get a total score for each county (e.g.,…
Mark Graban
Lean thinkers see the waste in health care when they are at the hospital gemba. I think this is true whether you are a lean person who is new to health care or if you’re a long-time hospital person who has learned lean. Experts (doctors) ranging from John Toussaint to Patricia Gabow to Don Berwick…
Jon Miller
I am in Japan helping to lead one of our lean manufacturing benchmarking trips. What I took away from the debriefing from yesterday’s lean benchmarking visit was a series of lessons on how to sustain a lean culture after 10 years. The company we visited had made a few defining choices, played its…
CEED
Students of CEED—an Australia-based program that links university engineering students with industry and government companies to complete specific on-site projects as part of their studies—are contributing significantly to the success of manufacturing projects, including those focused on making…
Davis Balestracci
During my recent travels, I have noticed an increasing tendency toward formalizing organizational quality improvement (QI) efforts into a separate silo. Even more disturbing is an increasing (and excruciating) formality. Expressions such as “saving dark-green dollars” are creeping into…
Jon Miller
Leaders lead. Or do they? There is not always a cause-and-effect relationship between leadership actions and follower behavior. Not all leaders succeed at pulling people along in the same direction. If a leader needs to drive people in a direction, keeping the fringes from straying too far from…
Steven Ouellette
Last month I wrote about how the random sampling distribution (RSD) of various sample statistics are the basis for pretty much everything in statistics. If you understand RSDs, you understand a lot about why we do what we do in hypothesis testing, inferential statistics, and estimation of…
Donald J. Wheeler
In my August column, “How to Turn Capability Indexes Into Dollars,” I defined the effective cost of production and use and showed how it can be obtained directly from the capability and performance indexes. In this column, I will show how these indexes can be used to estimate the benefits to be…
Jon Miller
Whether I am speaking about lean to an audience of one or 100, if the conversation goes on long enough the question inevitably arises: “What’s next for lean?” I always manage an answer, typically tying it to the theme of the discussion, speech, or intended teaching but never quite giving the same…
Mike Micklewright
“To effect the economies, to bring in the power, to cut out the waste, and thus to fully realize the wage motive, we must have big business – which does not, however, necessarily mean centralized business. We are decentralizing.”
--Henry Ford “Today and Tomorrow”, 1926
Is your…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
As every company knows, workplace information—production schedules, customer requirements, engineering specifications, operational methods, tooling and fixtures, material procurement, work-in-process, and the thousand other details on which the daily life of the enterprise depends—can change…
Barbara A. Cleary
A spate of cartoons and commentary throughout the summer has lampooned BP, Halliburton, Transocean, and Cameron International for their apparent inability to plan timely control measures that might have constrained the destruction after the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of…
