When I was a customer (rather than how my business card reads today: “Minitab Solutions Architect”) I only knew one thing that Minitab made. I had no idea how much Minitab could help me and the companies I worked for.
My wife and I like to grow vegetables in our side yard. My wife is also a Master Black Belt who not only allows me to use Minitab for home projects, but she also enjoys them herself. Occasionally she will remind me how to present data so a reader can get some insights out of it. This just happened in a control chart I was planning for this blog! How embarrassing! But I’ll show you her revised version when we get that far.
Not a gardener? No problem, that’s not really the point of the blog – it’s just a way to tell a relatable story to reveal all the interesting ways Minitab can help you that you may not be aware of yet!
In the coming months, I will present my findings as they grow from seedlings into, hopefully, some delicious veggies. This will also allow me to share some of Minitab’s best solutions with you in this blog series. I will reveal Minitab tips that I wish I had known as a customer (when I only knew the one green logo on my desktop as “Minitab”).
I hope you find this easy to understand, useful for your own garden and ideally useful for your work where you use Minitab for much bigger projects than my minor cost-saving and garden quality improvement project!
Here’s my current plan to present for your review:
It's important to be able to plan and document projects. Although I love a good DMAIC, PDCA, or Kaizen project (all of which Workspace has) … This experiment to share with you is intentionally kept simpler, so I will describe it in a short series of blogs.
Customers may remember the earlier variant of this solution called Quality Companion.
Today we have Minitab Workspace (for problem solvers themselves) and Minitab Engage (added features for leadership such as KPI dashboards... I’m not running Engage for my tiny garden project with my wife... but at prior companies Engage would have helped us save millions of additional dollars from improvement projects!)
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Here’s one graphical display of data (the series will dig deeper later).
Many paths lead to Rome (there are a lot of ways you could find insights from data).
One thing I see in this individual value chart from seeds I planted is that radishes pop up almost immediately! This is a great plant to start with if you’re new to gardening or simply impatient. My dad loves radishes just plain. My wife and I like to roast them. My favorite is not from the red part at all but rather when you process the radish greens into pesto sauce!
I want to share with you both the trusted techniques I used in my prior companies but also some of the new techniques I’ve learned since joining Minitab and working with so many customers at so many different companies!
You may not know, Minitab has solutions to help connect to databases, or in my case create web forms to collect and store data along with automated data analysis with alerts. If my garden was trending towards the wrong moisture level or wrong pH the system would send a text or email to my wife suggesting what action to take to save the veggies!
My second blog in this series is coming soon::" Summer Surplus", I will talk to you again then! --Jim