Confidence intervals show the range of values we can be fairly, well, confident, that our true value lies in, and they are very important to any quality practitioner. I could be 95-percent confident the volume of a can of soup will be 390–410 ml.

A lot of people in my classes struggle with conditional probability. Don’t feel alone, though. A lot of people get this (and simple probability, for that matter) wrong.

Many years ago, the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC) introduced a visual measurement device to my factory, referred to as a “production activity log” (PAL), also known to some as an hour-by-hou

Three years ago I wrote an article titled “The Emperor’s New Huddle Boards,” in which I expressed concern about the trappings of improvement without actual improvement.

There are many subjects that we cover regularly here at Quality Digest.

Process improvers the world over rally around root cause analysis as if it were the holy grail of all things organizational. But is it?

In our May 11, 2018, episode of QDL, we looked at overproducing ideas, bad quotas (aren’t they all), and how anger can help identify core values.

Last month I joined Eric Buhrens, CEO at Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), to host a leadership team from Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center. They were on a study mission to many of Boston’s fine hospitals and were winding up their week with a visit to LEI.

Boeing is demanding its suppliers reduce their prices by 10 percent, according to a February 2018 article published in Bloomberg Businessw

A couple of weeks ago I posed the question, “Are you overproducing improvements?” and compared a typical improvement “blitz” with a large monument ma