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SPC vs. Knowledge
Have you ever asked yourself just what control limits actually measure? Oh sure, there are the standard statistical answers: central tendency, process dispersion, capability and so on. But what do control limits measure fundamentally? The answer is ignorance. Ignorance is really the only reason we need SPC, or any statistics for that matter. Statistics help…
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U.S. Airlines Continue On-Time Improvement in February
Wow. 83% on time arrivals. And by “on time” we don’t mean, well, on time. On time is defined as within 15 minutes of schedule. This article compares the February on time percentage with January and with February of the previous year. This February was better. Of course, the root cause is assumed to be…
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Why Isn’t Six Sigma Used More in Healthcare?
Apparently there are still questions about whether or not a process improvement methodology like lean or Six Sigma can work in healthcare. I find this astonishing and disingenuous. The only real requirement for deploying any process improvement is whether or not there is a process that is done more than once. Healthcare at any respectably…
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21 Soft Skills All Six Sigma Belts Need
One of my most popular articles is 101 Things a Six Sigma Black Belt Should Know. Of course, the list is primarily a list of technical tools and skills needed, but anyone who has worked as a change agent knows that there’s more to it than that. Soft skills are at least as important, if…
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Small Samples
What is “Small”? Not enough data. We’ve all been there before. It may be that the production rate is too low. (I’ve worked with processes where one unit per month wasn’t unusual.) It may be that you have many covariates, such as customer research. If you slice-and-dice customers by industry type, geographic region, age, sex,…
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Nuts-Inspection Won’t Improve Food Safety
First peanuts, now pistachios. Not to mention spinach, almonds and host of other vegetables. Major salmonella outbreaks have been in the news a lot in recent years. The government and the food industry are working overtime to beef up guidelines on what companies need to do to keep consumers safe. USA Today reports that the…
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Non-Normal Distributions in the Real World
One day, early in my quality career, I was approached by my friend Wayne, the manager of our galvanizing plant. ‘Tom,” he began, “I’ve really been pushing quality in my area lately, and everyone’s involved. We’re currently working on a problem with plating thickness. Your reports always show a 3-percent to 7-percent reject rate, and…
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Toyota Quality and the KISS Principle
If you’ve ever read The Toyota Way, or even Taiichi Ohno’s book Toyota Production System you’ll be immediately struck by one observation: quality is simple. Toyota resolves most quality issues quickly because they limit the big quality killer: inventory. Inventory kills quality by placing a time-delay between the appearance of a quality problem and it’s…
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Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Expectations
There is much confusion about the constructs of quality and customer satisfaction (Q/CS). “Quality is doing the right things right,” say some experts, but how can we be assured that a service provider is doing the right things? Here’s an example: “I recognize that the opera singer has a tremendous vocal range [high quality], but…
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Voice of the Customer-The New QFD
To say Mary Scott was nervous was an understatement. She was downright scared. Since her new boss told her that Quality 2.0 would be different, there was one change that she most dreaded: making her department’s transition from a cost center to a profit center. “We need to sell our services, people,” Mary announced. She…