It’s all too easy to make mistakes involving statistics.

(ASQ: Milwaukee, WI) -- The results of ASQ’s 25th annual Salary Survey show strong average salaries for quality professionals in 2011 and fewer lay-offs as companies continue to see the value of quality and its positive impact on an organization.

Many times measurements are made using measurement increments which are too large for the job. Fortunately this problem is easily detected by ordinary, production-line process behavior charts.

In production plants across the globe, lean manufacturing techniques are being used to meet increasing demands placed on manufacturers.

The teaching of lean concepts is typically tuned to continuous processes: Day in, day out, value flows continuously from suppliers until the final product reaches the customer.

From the perspective of data analysis, rare events are problematic. Until we have an event, there is nothing to count, and as a result many of our time periods will end up with zero counts.

The quote “Baseball been berry, berry good to me” comes from one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits from the late 1970s. Garrett Morris played Chico Escuela, a retired Hispanic baseball player who knew very little English.

Regular tiered meetings are a staple of any company’s lean management system.

Let's face it—many industrial researchers, including Six Sigma Black Belts, do a terrible job of planning the research they need to do to perform their jobs efficiently. See that guy over there?

A run chart is a graphical display of data over time. Run charts are used to visually analyze processes according to time or sequential order.