Tips and Techniques for Statistics and Quality Improvement

Most people who have taken a statistics class, whether it be Six Sigma or a college course or elsewhere, learned about the assumptions from which each test was developed. And boy are there a lot of assumptions!

Chances are a rather large and complicated flowchart was presented to help students navigate to the right hypothesis test – in my original course the chart was so big it had to be printed on 11x17 paper and...

In this day and age, it’s not uncommon that data entry errors occur in data sets that are so large that looking for and correcting the errors by hand is impractical. Fortunately, Minitab includes tools that make it easy to get your data into shape, so that you can proceed to getting the answers you need.

The regulatory authorities worldwide largely driven by the Federal Drugs Administration in the U.S and its European counterpart, are making increasing demands in the interest of patient safety.

Pharmaceutical companies and organizations in the health sector are to apply more complete and complex techniques mainly for process validation but also for the monitoring and the evaluation of the performance of production...

Getting your data from Excel into Minitab Statistical Software for analysis is easy, especially if you keep the following tips in mind.

Spring is in the air, and Easter is coming up soon! Easter occurs relatively late this year, on April 21. Some years it seems early and some it seems late. So I started wondering about the distribution of Easter dates. Which dates are more common and which are less common? 

People in the gym get inspired by exercises that movie stars use to get a “superhero” physique. And more female superheroes in cinema now inspire more women to try free weights in the gym.

I was skeptical about this - could resistance training benefit me, if I didn't want a bulky physique? So I began measuring my workouts: after all, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Here is how I analyzed my fitness...

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% confident the volume of a can of soup will be 390-410 ml. I could be 99% confident under 2% of the products in my batch are defective.

On the Minitab Blog, we’ve often discussed getting data into Minitab from Excel. Here's a small sampling, in case you currently have data in Excel:

Choosing the correct linear regression model can be difficult. Trying to model it with only a sample doesn’t make it any easier. In this post, we'll review some common statistical methods for selecting models, complications you may face, and provide some practical advice for choosing the best regression model.

Stability is a major issue in manufacturing. Parts need to be made to specifications to allow an easy assembly of final products. Unstable behaviors generate quality problems that customers must deal with later.

Yet there are often so many consecutive steps that a slight misalignment at one will impact the entire production line. Read on to see four challenges to stability, and how to address them.