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In everything from everyday language to mathematical logic problems, we often need a way to express just how much or how often something occurs or exists, in order for a statement to be clear or make sense.

When sampling, it is important to avoid bias, a lack of precision, and a lack of reproducibility. Having an understanding of population and how they work can help you avoid this.

Diagrams can be extremely helpful as a visual aid to gain understanding of a project. This is a valuable type of diagram that you will likely come back to time and again for your team projects.

Errors are an issue that should be kept to a minimum, especially for those aspiring to a high Sigma level.

Concomitant variables are secondary variables that may affect a process under study but are not the significant parameters that the research is designed to understand or control.

You have compared your process data before and after an improvement. Is the difference real or just noise?  Statistical significance will help you answer that question.

Variation and quality are not compatible with each other. The reality, however, is that anytime measurements are taken, there is going to be variation.

If you have ever taken a test and your results told you that you were in a certain percentile or quartile, you may already have a bit of an understanding of how quartiles and boxplots work. Q3 is an important part of fully understanding boxplots.

The concept of quality assurance began in the manufacturing industry and is now standard for most industries.

In your regression model, one thing to look for is multicolinearity. It is a problem and can cause issues when you are interpreting results.

In business, things aren’t always what they seem. Companies that want to see what’s really going on conduct audits to get actionable details.

Knowing how your company is doing and where it can improve is vital to the health of your organization. Performance metrics help to accomplish this and one such metric is a balanced scorecard.

Accountability is everything. It builds trust, reputation and responsibility and is the foundation of every good business practice.

Finding solutions to problems can often be better as a group effort. There are several group methods for addressing an issue. One option is the nominal group technique.

Correlation analysis is central to business operations in a wide range of industries, from statistics and research, to marketing and psychology, to agriculture and physics. Even a basic understanding of the overall principles can be useful for virtually any business, in any industry.

Every company faces risks all the time. Specific threats and priorities may change, but the need for an effective management strategy doesn’t.

Having enough data available for what you want to do is vital for estimates that are as precise as possible. Degree of freedom is a concept that assists in higher forms of statistical analysis.

Business transformation and lean deployment take dedicated resources with a particular set of skills to ensure change and continuous improvement are embedded in an organization. The role of change agents has never been more vital in today’s super competitive business world, and we’ll show you why.

The skill of an artisan can produce unique, beautiful and innovative products, but this type of process is challenging to capitalize on in business.

You’ve heard the saying “everything is a process.” It’s a diplomatic way of saying something is taking too long, is too inconvenient, or that an outcome is out of one’s control. But processes are not carved in stone. They are meant to be continually analyzed, taken apart, cleaned up, enhanced, and optimized. And business leaders who constantly engage with their company’s processes do so because it’s how they are empowered to control every detail, every outcome, every time.

Kanban is a tool used in Lean Manufacturing to visually manage the workflow through your processes. It is based on the concept of a pull system where things are only replaced as they are consumed. 

This consumer products company has a large portfolio of products. Working with key customers, the company develops and promotes brand marketing programs to help the customer improve their sales which increases the company’s revenue as well. The CEO of the company realized the percentage of successful promotions was less than he expected. At the same […]

Often in business, it becomes necessary to make changes to ensure a greater degree of quality. Just because a change is made though, does not necessarily mean an improvement has been made. Change needs to be systematic for quality to improve.

This mathematical value is, of course, the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter and is signified by the symbol π. In manufacturing, however, it can mean something else.

Overview: What Is Big ‘Q’? It is a strategic approach to quality improvement that focuses on the entire business rather than only seeking to improve the product itself. This management method asks every level of management to focus on exceeding customer expectations to produce global changes in how it meets market needs. Conversely, little ‘q’ […]

Process and measurement variations should be kept to a minimum. When looking at these variations and how they are impacting your work, there is a way to group them together.

It takes a lot of testing and evaluation in order to get software ready for the marketplace. Early on in software development, clearly defined methods were put in place to ensure high-quality products that were bug-free.

There are several ways that companies conduct inspections of their software. One such method is Fagan Style Software Inspection.

In modern manufacturing, it is likely that once operations reach a certain level of growth, they will be spread out over multiple locations and a standard of quality will be more difficult to maintain.

If you have a project goal, it can be tempting to forge full steam ahead without looking at any potential fallout. This is, of course, a mistake. It is always important to look at what issues might come up on the way towards reaching a project target. When working on the primary metric, other metrics should be kept aware of.

Sometimes, as companies make efforts to limit costs by improving their processes, they incur costs related to an increased level of inspection. This can prove to be even more costly than the initial issues.

If you are going to get something done, it is best to usually have a plan. If there are steps that need to be taken towards reaching a goal, those steps likely need to have a sensible order to them.

You have retrofitted your major production machine to make it run faster. Did the retrofit really improve machine speed? A 2-Sample t-Test can be used to answer that question. 

When you collect data from your process, the values will vary. This dispersion or variation of data around the central tendency can be measured. Let’s explore the different ways to measure dispersion.  

Randomness and independence are two required characteristics for understanding and analyzing process variation. The Runs Test allows you to check for the randomness of a set of sequentially collected data. 

The word gating is often used in the context of Six Sigma and DMAIC and is usually referred to as tollgate reviews. The purpose is to evaluate your progress, and make sure you’re still heading in the right direction. 

ANOVA is a powerful statistical method for comparing several samples (3 or more) to each other to see if the populations that the means came from are statistically different.

In production, some events are hard to predict, but most things can be prepared for with proper planning.

If you ever find yourself, solving the same problems week after week with nary a long-term impact, it could be worth creating a current reality tree to identify the root causes.

In the context of marketing, segmentation is the process of dividing a target market into groups with similar needs and behaviors. This allows you to develop unique strategies to meet specific wants and needs. 

With your company, you need to be able to have your customers believe in you, deliver products on-time, and understand your processes as well as how they can be improved. This can all be accomplished with a quality assurance schedule.

Now wait a minute, we already have a Quality Management System and a Quality Manual, I don’t have time for this Total Quality Management fad, right? Think again, this is no fad. With successful deployment and adoption of TQM you can elevate your business to new quality highs and both your customers and employees will reap the benefits.

Delivering quality and value for your company and your customers is a basic building block of business success and growth. With Total Value Management (TVM) we will show you a system that is straightforward to deploy, delivers real and tangible results, locking in value for you and your customers alike.

If your manufacturing process produces multiple products or SKUs in short runs, how many control charts will you need to monitor those different products? With short-run SPC, you might only need one. 

Does your organization use a pull or push system to allow your manufacturing function to meet your customers’ demand for your products? Let’s learn why a pull system might be a better approach for optimizing your organization.

In engineering and manufacturing, there are situations where measuring in degrees is not the best option. For these metrics, you will find that radian is a better fit.

When managing any organization, there are four voices you should be listening to; Voice of the Customer, Voice of the Process, Voice of the Business and Voice of the Employee. Let’s focus on learning more about the Voice of the Employee or VOE. 

If you need a control chart that is quick and easy to set up in order to track defects, an F-chart is worth knowing about.

Addressing the challenges posed by capacity constraint resources determines how much and how quickly businesses can grow beyond their status quo.

We know that many hypothesis tests have an underlying assumption of normality. But, what if your data is not normal? Let’s see how the 1-sample sign test can help.