Tips and Techniques for Statistics and Quality Improvement

Bill Kahn runs the statistical modeling group for consumer banking at Bank of America. His team builds hundreds of models using a broad range of statistical and machine learning techniques. These models help ensure financial stability for individuals, enterprises, and communities throughout the country. Over the past few decades, Bill has led statistics groups at several Fortune 500 financial service, consulting, and...

As a Technical Leader and Manager in Ford Motor Company’s Global Data Insights and Analytics organization, Bob Thomas is responsible for supporting data-driven analytic solution development that produces business, product and manufacturing insights.

Adam Russell is a Global Operations Master Black Belt, Tate & Lyle.

Tate & Lyle deploys Continuous Improvement (CI) tools, including Minitab and Salford Predictive Modeler (SPM), to address challenging engineering and manufacturing problems. Our company operates large-scale, continuous flow processes serving the Food & Beverage industry.

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.

The potential benefit of the data stored on servers is huge. Banks, insurance companies, telecom companies, manufacturers — in fact organizations from across all industries need to make good use of the data they own to improve their operations, better understand their customers and find competitive advantage.

The World Cup has finally concluded with France becoming champion for the second time. Although disappointed at not seeing England played in the final, I certainly enjoyed all the drama on pitch. In my previous post, we had a poll to get opinions from The Minitab Blog readers on who they thought would win in the final. Now, it’s time to look at the results and see how many of our readers have the ability of...

In our continuing effort to use experimental design to understand how to drive the golf ball the farthest off the tee, we have decided each golfer will perform half the possible combinations of high and low settings for each factor. But how many times should each golfer replicate their runs to produce a complete data set?

Tomorrow marks the 47th anniversary of the premiere of the great 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, wherein the reclusive owner of the Wonka Chocolate Factory decides to place golden tickets in five of his famous chocolate bars, and allow the winners of each to visit his factory with a guest. Since restarting production after three years of silence, no one has come in or gone out of the factory....

As we broke for lunch, two participants in the training class began to discuss, debate, and finally fight over a fundamental task in golf —how to drive the ball the farthest off the tee. Both were avid golfers and had spent a great deal of time and money on professional instruction and equipment, so the argument continued through the lunch hour, with neither arguer stopping to eat. Several other class participants...

Do you have an insurance policy that will pay out if your car gets damaged? Do you pay the premium because you know your car will be damaged? No, you pay it so that if you do damage your car you will get a payment to cover the damage.