Tips and Techniques for Statistics and Quality Improvement

We all have our favorite tools, tricks, methods and ways for completing, tracking and improving our work. Personally I'm a visual learner, so I’ve always been drawn to process mapping and flowcharts. 

Love it or hate it, brainstorming is something we've all done at some point in our lives. Those sessions may have been disorderly at times with ideas coming from every direction or totally structured with the help of a particular diagram.

Since the late 1960's, Ishikawa diagrams have helped millions of people through the process of brainstorming potential causes of an effect or problem and mapping those relationships.

Why do so many improvement programs ultimately end up on the chopping block? Company leaders often sponsor these efforts in the first place, so what happens between the day a deployment kicks off with the C-suite's enthusiastic support and the day the plug is pulled?

Even projects that result in marked improvements often fail to make an impression on decision-makers.

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...

Colin Noone reveals that improvement activities have delivered over £2.6bn validated savings over 15 years at Rolls-Royce plc. With over 40 years experience at the power generation engineering company he is enthusiastic to share his takeaways with the Minitab community.

Colin is the company's Global Master Black Belt for Methods & Capability. Next month he is speaking at the Minitab Insights event in the UK, part of...

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...

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...

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.