Category: Concepts

Mura is a Japanese word meaning unevenness, non-uniformity, and irregularity.

FMEA stands for Failure Mode Effects Analysis and allows you to think through all of the possible ways something can go wrong, then find ways to mitigate those risks, so that your project is more likely to succeed.

An alias indicates that you’ve changed two or more things at the same time in the same way. Aliasing is a synonym for confounding.

Process maturity is a concept used by the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodology to evaluate and optimize business processes.

The Six Sigma process report is a Minitab tool that calculates process capability and provides visuals of process performance.

First in Still Here (FISH) is a term that refers to very slow-moving inventory.

The process where planning, testing, and reporting occur in the design or prototype stage in the development of a product.

RONA is one bottom-line measurement showing performance relative to strategic goals and objectives.

Confirmation is a way to confirm that a process is working as expected. It can be used to validate or invalidate a hypothesis, test a process or product and test the process of testing.

A process window index (PWI) is a quantifiable and reproducible statistical measure which indicates how a product performs relative to range limits.

Ideation brainstorming is the first stage of a formal solution development process that usually includes free-form exchange of thoughts and ideas.

The Keep it Simple and Specific principal is based on the idea that most systems work at their best if they are kept simple as opposed to being made complicated.

Activity Based Costing (ABC) is a tool to help companies understand how their products and services are being used.

Systems thinking is based upon the concept that all systems are composed of interconnected parts. These connections and interrelationships cause behavior of one part to impact another.

Entry criteria is an established set of conditions that must be met before a specific process can begin.

The Poisson distribution is a discrete probability distribution that provides the probability of a given number of events occurring in a specified interval of time or space.

S-hat is a common model used in statistics when estimating a population.

Inferential statistics consists of several statistical tools that will allow you to make an inference about the population from sample data.

Capability is the ability of your process or product to meet expectations of your customers or any internal organizational expectations, goals or targets.

Benchmarking is comparing what you do to how other organizations do it.

Businesses should have clear expectations from every procedure, activity and task that happens in their workplace. These expectations can be formalized as process design requirements, which describe the minimum acceptable results from a particular process. Overview: What are process design requirements? Active business managers don’t just let things unfold and develop on their own. Control […]

In statistics, variation is a measure of the dispersion or spread of your process data.

A covariate is a continuous variable that affects a process that is not the direct target of the study. Excluding known covariates from an investigation can lead to skewed or biased results, which can reduce the value of the analysis or even render it worthless for its intended purpose. Accounting for known covariates is crucial […]

SMED or Single Minute Exchange of Dies is a process for reducing changeover time.