Meredith Griffith
When I wrote about automation back in March, I made my husband out to be an automation guru. He certainly is, but what you don’t know about my husband is that, although he loves to automate...
Fred Schenkelberg
Spending too much on reliability and not getting the results you expect? Just getting started and not sure where to focus your reliability program? Or, just looking for ways to improve your program...
Donald J. Wheeler
Having described the report card chart and the process monitor chart in previous columns, we now turn to a third way that people use process behavior charts—the process trial chart. Here the...
Patrick Runkel
It’s been called a “demographic watershed.” During the next 15 years alone, the worldwide population of individuals aged 65 and older is projected to increase more than 60 percent, from...
Donald J. Wheeler
Story update 10/9/2023: This article is a corrected version. The earlier version suffered from a programming error that affected all of the PID results.
Many articles and some textbooks describe...
Gillian Groom
You often hear the data being blamed when an analysis does not deliver the expected answers. I was recently reminded that the data chosen or collected for a specific analysis is determined by the...
Bruno Scibilia
Businesses are getting more and more data from existing and potential customers. Whenever we click on a website, for example, it can be recorded in the vendor’s database, and whenever we use...
Barbara A. Cleary
Approaching the end of the school year means focusing on graduation rates, dropout rates, and other data suggesting trends for students. Opportunities for considering statistics abound, but one...
Ken Levine
How do you determine the “worst case” scenario for a process? Is it by assuming the worst case for each process task or step? No. The reason is that the probability of every step having its worst...
Ken Voytek
In a recent post, I examined the differences in productivity across small and large manufacturing firms, and noted that there were differences across manufacturers in terms of size. But it’s also...
Greg Fox
Remember the classic science fiction film The Matrix? The dark sunglasses, the leather, computer monitors constantly raining streams of integers (inexplicably in base 10 rather than binary or...
Patrick Runkel
What does the eyesight of a homeless person have in common with complications from dental anesthesia? Or with reducing side-effects from cancer? Or monitoring artificial hip implants?
These are all...
Davis Balestracci
In my last column I explained how many situations have an inherent response surface, which is the “truth.” However, any experimental result represents this true response, which is unfortunately...
Donald J. Wheeler
The simple process behavior chart can be used in many different ways. Since report card data are common in all types of businesses, the report card chart is often the first chart that people create...
Patrick Runkel
The Pareto chart is a graphic representation of the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. If you’re a quality improvement specialist, you know that the chart is named after the early 20th...
Davis Balestracci
I’ve mentioned that design of experiments (DOE) is one of the few things worth salvaging from typical statistical training, and I thought I’d talk a bit more about DOE in the next couple of columns...
Brooke Pierce
The healthcare industry is in a state of constant change, and with change comes opportunity. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (...
Donald J. Wheeler
Experimental designs that result in orthogonal data structures allow us to get the most out of both our analysis and our research budget. As a result, designed experiments have been used for...
Donald S. Holmes
Regression analysis is used in a variety of manufacturing applications. An example of such an application would be to learn the effect of process variables on output quality variables. This allows...
Fred Schenkelberg
What if all failures occurred truly randomly? Well, for one thing the math would be easier.
The exponential distribution would be the only time to failure distribution—we wouldn’t need Weibull or...
