Tips and Techniques for Statistics and Quality Improvement

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.

Value stream mapping is a cornerstone of the Lean process improvement methodology, and also is a recognized tool used in Six Sigma. A value stream map illustrates the flow of materials and information as a product or service moves through a process. Creating a “current state” value stream map can help you identify waste and also makes it easier to envision an improved state for process in the future.

The abbreviation FMEA is short for Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. It's a tool that helps you look very carefully and systematically at exactly how and why things can go wrong, so you can do your best to prevent that from happening.

You might be thinking, six weeks and you’re still not telling us what happened? When you are solving a manufacturing or development problem you might hear the same thing from your leadership – when will we get the results?

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 Sigma deployment, he has overseen the execution of more than 4,000 major improvement projects and another 6,000 small improvement projects. Here are three key insights he shared about managing continuous improvement...

How do you commit to realistic forecasts and timelines when resources are limited or gathering real data is too expensive or impractical? Can simulated data be trusted for accurate predictions? That’s when Monte Carlo Simulation comes in.  

Dramatic cost savings. Lead time and inventory reductions. Improved transactional processes.

Editor's note: If you would like to see these tools presented in a webinar, visit our On Demand Webinars and look for "5 Critical Tools for Your Lean Deployment."

The two previous posts in this series focused on manipulating data using Minitab’s calculator and the Data menu.

My previous post focused on manipulating text data using Minitab’s calculator.