Statistical process control (SPC) charts were developed by Walter Shewhart and introduced to the world in his 1931 book "Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product".  The purpose of control charts is to identify when an assignable cause of variation has entere...

We take measurements every day to control processes and to accept or reject products. Often, there is little thought that goes into understanding the measurement system. We take it for granted that the numbers are good.

The quality of a measurement system is determined...

Too much variation is a common cause of defects in a manufacturing company. This variation causes some items to be over or under the specification limit. All manufacturers lose products due to excess variation. Many food manufacturers struggle with overweight / underwe...

Manufacturers lose most of their profits due to Quality problems. Consider that for a moment. Do you think that is true at your workplace?

The Cost of Quality model tells us that a typical manufacturer loses up to 20% of revenues due to Quality problems.  These losses c...

In this post I want to describe a simple technique that can lead to learning something new. In this case, we found out something interesting and useful when we looked closely at some measurement data for a new product.

The product is a power tool and our data set consis...

There are a lot of people who are responsible for business process improvement and it can be a daunting task. Where does one begin? 

 All companies face countless problems with products and processes. Customer complaints, late deliveries, parts that don't fit, mislabell...

All organizations today dedicate some level of effort on improving their business processes. It's an important component of competitive strategy. Leading organizations invest heavily in improvement with Theory of Constraints (TOC) Lean and Six Sigma activity. There are...

There have been several occassions in my work history when something out of the world of applied statistics struck me as being rather insightful. There was the time when a customer told us he knew our data was suspect because there were no tails in the distribution. At...

I think this advice is pretty obvious but I don't see it being employed often enough. Many of us are tasked with improving a process (solving a problem) and we're usually part of a team so there are lots of ideas and discussions. The process we are trying to fix has so...