Davis Balestracci
During the early 1990s, I was president of the Twin Cities Deming Forum. I had a wonderful board whose members were full of great ideas. One member, Doug Augustine, was a 71-year-old retired Lutheran...
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
In the foreword of Mark Graban’s book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More (Constancy Inc., 2018), renowned statistician, Donald J. Wheeler, writes about Graban: “He has...
Rip Stauffer
I must admit, right up front, that this is not a totally unbiased review. I first became aware of Davis Balestracci in 1998, when I received the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Statistics Division...
Donald J. Wheeler
In “Data Snooping Part 1” (Quality Digest, Aug. 6, 2018) we discovered the basis for the first caveat of data snooping. Here we discover three additional caveats of data snooping.
Last month we...
Donald J. Wheeler
Data mining is the foundation for the current fad of “big data.” Today’s software makes it possible to look for all kinds of relationships among the variables contained in a database. But owning a...
William A. Levinson
Quality and manufacturing practitioners are most familiar with the effect of variation on product quality, and this is still the focus of the quality management and Six Sigma bodies of knowledge....
Donald J. Wheeler
The ultimate purpose for collecting data is to take action. In some cases the action taken will depend upon a description of what is at hand. In others the action taken will depend upon a prediction...
Douglas C. Fair
A few months back, I was reading a really good article from The Wall Street Journal, titled “Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs.” Even though it was geared toward accounting and...
NACS
The phrase, “Are we there yet?” has long been associated with boring summer road trips. However, a new study shatters that myth, as it shows that 69 percent of people say traveling to their...
Harish Jose
I have written about sample size calculations many times before. One of the most common questions a statistician is asked is, “How many samples do I need—is a sample size of 30 appropriate?” The...
Scott A. Hindle
I recently got hold of the set of data shown in figure 1. What can be done to analyze and make sense of these 65 data values is the theme of this article. Read on to see what is exceptional about...
Scott Weaver
The Atlantic hurricane season is now upon us, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just released its 2018 seasonal hurricane outlook which calls for a slightly above...
Anthony D. Burns
Quality is related to processes. A process is “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.” It doesn’t matter whether the process is the handling of invoices, customers...
Cheryl Pammer
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...
Rip Stauffer
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. If you read Innumeracy by John...
Donald J. Wheeler
Some properties of a probability model are hard to describe in practical terms. The explanation for this rests upon the fact that most probability models will have both visible and invisible portions...
Mike Richman
There are many subjects that we cover regularly here at Quality Digest. Chief among these are standards (ISO 9001 or IATF 16949, for example) methodologies (such as lean, Baldrige, or Six Sigma), and...
Donald J. Wheeler
In The Music Man, the con man Prof. Harold Hill sells band instruments and uniforms and then tells the kids that they can play music if they will “just think about the notes and then play them.” In...
Evan McLaughlin
As the vice president of quality for a $1.5 billion-dollar industrial corporation, Hermann Miskelly is responsible for leading its continuous improvement effort. Now in his 10th year of a lean Six...
Davis Balestracci
Customer satisfaction surveys are all the rage these days. Healthcare has a couple of “800 pound gorilla” surveyors whose services (and nontrivial expense) have been pretty much forced upon it. In...
