All Features
Stewart Anderson
Story update 10/22/2009: We added a reference to Toyota Kata in the first paragraph.
The tools and techniques of what is commonly called “lean manufacturing” have their origin in the Toyota Production System (TPS). While the lean movement deserves much credit for popularizing these tools and…
Steven Ouellette
I'm not saying that the following apply to you... really. But, you might be a Black Belt if...
You test your co-workers for normality – and find some of them to be non-normal and a little skewed…
…and you know you can handle non-normal co-workers if you can just transform them
You recall…
In 2005, according to a BBC News report at the time, operating rooms all over the United Kingdom were thrown into chaos and operations canceled due to broken, missing, or dirty surgical instruments. The Royal College of Surgeons called for a national audit of decontamination units, following a…
Bill Kalmar
Regular readers of my column know that I abhor surveys that don’t provide some type of incentive or discount on a future purchase for completing the survey. I realize that I may have discussed this subject ad nauseam, but have you noticed that every store, restaurant, gas station, doctor’s office…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
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n his inauguration speech, President Obama called for improving health care quality and reducing costs. In 2008, U.S. health care costs exceeded $2.4 trillion and are expected to climb to $3.1 trillion by 2012, according to the National Coalition on Health Care.
Of these costs, 25 percent…
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n emergency response organization differs substantially from our usual public health organization for day-to-day business. However, as the spring 2009 H1N1 (also referred to as swine flu) outbreak highlighted, usual public health processes are fundamental for effectively responding to a…
Donald J. Wheeler
This is the final column in the debate between Donald Wheeler and Forrest Breyfogle on whether or not to transform data prior to analysis. Because the debate started with Wheeler's article "Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?" we are letting him have the last word on the topic.
The articles following…
Raissa Carey
To Chris Collins, lean and Six Sigma, just like government and business management, go hand in hand.
In Erie County, where he fiercely advocates that a lean government can and will save taxpayers millions of dollars, Chris Collins became the first county executive in the nation to implement lean…
While I have been saying this for decades, and while K’ung Fu-tzu implied it millennia ago when he called for a balance of knowledge and action, it takes a while to sink in. W. Edwards Deming showed how simply taking a pencil with paper and plotting the data makes action possible. Experts in data…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
A previous article of mine in this newsletter, “NOT Transforming the Data Can Be Fatal to Your Analysis,” addressed the need for appropriate transformations and a predictive performance measurement system.
The statistical business performance charting (SBPC) methodology that was described in…
James O. Pearson
We have all had to plan a trip to the airport. Sometimes it goes well and sometimes not so well. One of the problems we have is dealing with the variation in the trip time to the airport. Since I travel to the airport a lot and like analyzing data, I keep track of my travel time to the airport.…
Steven Ouellette
If you have been following my articles over the last few months, you have seen that even though statistical process control (SPC) charts are very powerful tools for examining a process, it turns out that there are a lot of ways to mess up SPC. This month, I am going to finish up with a few more…
John Stiller
Story update 9/23/09: Reference to 9.5.2.f was changed to 8.5.2.f in second paragraph.
As more suppliers are required by their regulators and customers to achieve ISO 9001 certification, and because certification symbolizes a point of competitive differentiation in a tight economy, emphasis on…
Stewart Anderson
Is the theory of constraints compatible with lean thinking and can the two approaches be used together? This article looks at some of the similarities and differences between the two approaches and suggests how they might be coupled to advantage.
The book, Lean Lexicon: A Graphical Glossary for…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
Not surprisingly, there was controversy over Forrest Breyfogle's article, "Non-normal Data: To Transform or Not to Transform," written in response to Donald Wheeler’s article "Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?" Wheeler continued the debate with "Transforming the Data Can Be Fatal to Your Analysis."…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
“Writing is not a job; it’s a hobby!” thundered my father when I told him my plans for college. “You need to get a profession: Medicine, law, engineering, or accounting.”
I cheerlessly acquiesced and enrolled in a pre-med program, but at the end of my first year, after struggling through…
Donald J. Wheeler
Following my article on Leptokurtophobics (Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?) it was almost inevitable that we should hear from one. We were fortunate to have someone as articulate as Forrest Breyfogle III to write the response. However, rather than offering a critique of the points raised in my…
Lonnie Wilson
Five things to lean my company? In two days? That's pretty quick. Why so quickly?
I can think of two reasons. First, people expect things to be done better and faster each day; and it appears we’re getting decent at doing just that. Lean has made huge strides toward contributing to that “…
Bill Kalmar
The band “Chicago” sang those words about "time" decades ago. The second line “Does anybody really care?” seems to sum up what is still in vogue today, especially in the workplace. Just as with vacations where workers are reluctant to leave for fear that someone will discover that their job is…
Michelle Paret, Eston Martz
Story update 8/27/2009: An error was spotted and corrected by author in paragraph starting with "The population mean for a six-sided die..."
Mark Twain famously quipped that there were three ways to avoid telling the truth: lies, damned lies, and statistics. The joke works because statistics…
Minitab LLC
Story update 8/27/2009: An error was spotted and corrected by author in paragraph starting with "The population mean for a six-sided die..."
Mark Twain famously quipped that there were three ways to avoid telling the truth: lies, damned lies, and statistics. The joke works because statistics…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
Story update 8/24/2009: The original graphics for this story were missing key data due to errors in converting them. We have fixed the problem.
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n “Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?” Don Wheeler stated, “‘But the software suggests transforming the data!’ Such advice is simply another piece of…
Steven Ouellette
Over the past couple of articles, we have explored how an incomplete understanding of how SPC limits are calculated can lead to constructing control charts that look strange. But using some of the things I mentioned, hopefully you can see that these “strange” control charts actually reveal quite…
David Boghossian
As the founder of PowerSteering and a practitioner in strategic management and continuous improvement for more than 25 years, I have seen my share of management fads come and go, and even been in the room when some of them were created.
There were quality circles and total quality management…
Li Zongming
Design of experiments (DOE) is a crucial tool in Six Sigma quality management and its application is widespread in Japan; nevertheless, many manufacturing companies in other countries have not formally adopted it because of its complex concepts and costs. As a matter of fact, the essence of the…
