As the vice president of quality for a $1.5 billion-dollar industrial corporation, Hermann Miskelly is responsible for leading its continuous improvement effort.

Anticipating challenges is always a daunting task for continuous improvement professionals. Unforeseen inefficiencies in process or defects in product development can throw timelines and associated costs into disarray.

Some 20 years ago, my colleague Chau Tran and I developed a way to simulate the trajectories of millions of basketballs on the computer.

Story update 9/26/2017: The words "distribution of" were inadvertently left out of the last sentence of the second paragraph.