Tips and Techniques for Statistics and Quality Improvement

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.

With Minitab, it’s easy to create graphs and manage numeric, date/time and text data. But Minitab’s enhanced data manipulation features make it easier to work with text data, too.

For a process improvement practitioner, finishing the Control Phase of the DMAIC process is your ticket to move on to your next project. You’ve done an excellent job leading the project team because they identified root causes, developed and implemented solutions to resolve those root causes, put a control plan in place and transitioned the process back to the Process Owner. Soon, however, you learn that the process...

Last week I was fielding questions on social media about Minitab 18, the latest version of our statistical software. Almost as soon as the new release was announced, we received a question that comes up often from people in pharmaceutical and medical device companies: