A Better DMAIC
Define, measure, analyze, improve, control, goes the mantra used to carry out improvement projects in many companies. In various books, these steps get slightly different interpretations.
Dr. Wheeler’s ‘Understanding SPC’ Seminars Now Online
Dr. Donald J. Wheeler has been one of Quality Digest’s most highly read authors for decades.
Outliers Are Pure Gold!
Outliers are values that don’t “fit in” with the rest of the data. These extreme values are commonly considered a nuisance when we seek to summarize the data with our descriptive statistics.
How RAG LLM Can Enhance Your Business’ Data Retrieval Efficiency
In an age where data are among the most valuable assets for any business, the ability to retrieve, process, and utilize information efficiently is critical for success.
OEE and the Unreachable Goal
The Man of La Mancha never got to the unreachable goal—and if you’re being judged by overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), then your manager may also be dreaming an impossible dream. This column will look at problems associated with the use of OEE values.
First, Create Your Graph
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Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
In last month’s article, “ANOVA and the Process Behavior Chart,” we saw how both techniques use the same basic comparison to answer completely d
Total Factor Productivity
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Photo by Zohair Mirza on Unsplash
Recent labor relations controversies and ongoing arguments about the minimum wage have raised questions as to how a supply chain should share the utility it produces.
ANOVA and the Process Behavior Chart
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The peacock’s plumage serves as an example of “Fisherian runaway,” a concept of natural selection named for Sir Ronald Fisher, who also created the analysis of variance (ANOVA). Credit: Creative Commons; photo by Haribabu Pasupathy.
When Sir Ronald Fisher created the analysis of variance (ANOVA) in the 1920s, he extended the two-sample t-test to allow the comparison of k sample averages. During the same time period, Dr. Walter Shewhart was creating the process behavior chart.
A Secret of Effective Data Analysis
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Photo by Niklas Garnholz on Unsplash
Managers are commonly fed a diet of report-card data. These data have usually been aggregated into summaries, averages, and totals to characterize the big picture. As useful as such summaries can be, they can also be an obstacle to an effective analysis.
How Atomic Clocks Have Changed Our World
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One of NIST’s ytterbium lattice atomic clocks: NIST physicists combined two of these experimental clocks to make the world’s most stable single atomic clock. The image is a stacked composite of about 10 photos in which an index card was positioned in front of the lasers to reveal the laser beam paths. Credit: N. Phillips/NIST
Time: We all have a sense of it, an innate feel for it. We see it and use it every day.
