Tips and Techniques for Statistics and Quality Improvement

When you hear about projects that save Fortune 500 companies millions, you might think operational excellence and continuous improvement programs guarantee success. Experienced practitioners tell a different story. We surveyed nearly 200 of them at all skill levels from major companies across the United States. What was the one factor they believed tied most directly to success?

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...

When you learn Six Sigma, familiarizing yourself with the alphabet soup of acronyms and abbreviations can be overwhelming. From FMEA and C&E Matrix to Gage R&R and SIPOC… the list goes on and on! DMAIC, DMADV, and DFSS can be some of the trickiest to keep straight because they sound so similar.

But it's OK. We're here to help with that!

We might not be able to observe the progressive loss of cognitive and intellectual abilities someone with dementia is experiencing from the outside, but healthcare clinicians can detect it when they observe their ability to bathe, groom or dress themselves deteriorate. Minitab consultant  and Insights 2019 speaker David Patrishkoff is researching how to help with the aid of Minitab software. 

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...

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...

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.