Category: Concepts

Will being a Black Belt help you beat up your competition? In a way, yes. A skilled and experienced Lean Six Sigma Black Belt will help your organization improve all you do. Let’s see how.

During the Six Sigma Improvement Stage of DMAIC, you will need to develop strategies and ideas for improving your process. There are three steps to coming up with viable improvement solutions. These steps are idea generation, organization, and assessment.  Brainstorming can be defined as a structured method of generating unconstrained ideas/ solutions and gaining engagement/involvement […]

Balanced experiments are a common class of designed experiment where the factors that are manipulated are set at levels that occur equally within each level of the other factors. This setup provides several advantages, including the need for few experimental runs, lack of correlation between factors, and simplicity.

Concept engineering is how you measure twice and cut once. It’s how you learn from mistakes before you make them. This practice is a way to consider problems and possibilities that may emerge from initial design to final production.

See Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Such is the case with a box plot. This simple graph can be used to describe many things about your data. Let’s see how.

You know variation in your process is not a good thing. It negatively impacts predictability and planning. Let’s learn about an easy way to measure variation so you can better understand your process.

Blocking doesn’t always refer to football. It can also apply to Design of Experiments. Let’s explore how that works.

In the context of Lean Six Sigma, we can talk about bias in the context of measurement and statistics. Minimizing or eliminating bias in your measurement data and statistical analysis should be a goal. Let’s explore the many types, sources, and impact of bias. 

Data collection doesn’t always have to be a complex process. A simple check sheet can allow you to capture relevant data in a graphical format for initial interpretation of your process or for in-depth analysis later.

Is Chaku Chaku a real word or the sound of machines loading and unloading parts? It turns out that Chaku Chaku is Japanese for load load and a system of loading and unloading parts from a machine. Let’s explore this a little deeper.

All decisions carry some risk of being wrong. The management of that risk will reduce your downsides. Beta risk is one of the risks associated with hypothesis testing. Let’s learn a little more about it.

With any business, it is important to be able to separate yourself from the competition to gain an advantage. This can be anything from running your operations with greater efficiency to being able to differentiate the attributes of your product from those of your rivals. Having a competitive advantage and being able to maintain it […]

Some tasks are repetitive, mind-numbing, and lack the sort of creativity that promotes active engagement. If possible, these types of processes should be automated so that the type of energy needed to find places where your organization can evolve may blossom. Businesses thrive on having employees that are engaged in the work that they are […]

At the gun range, your goal is to hit the target. Accuracy will be measured by how close you come to that target. The same is true of your process.  

Why do you weigh yourself before you start your diet? You probably want to get a starting point or baseline to help measure your progress so you know whether the diet is working or you have reached your goal. 

By standardizing a project, an organization is better able to analyze the effects of environmental factors that may have otherwise been overlooked. Baselining is one way to achieve this.

3P? How hard could that be? It’s only three letters: P-P-P. You will see that there is more than meets the eye.

Are you confused yet? Is it the 6 Ms? Is it 5 Ms and a P? How about 4 Ms, 5 Ms or 8 Ms? Let’s explore some of these and figure it out.

To optimize the benefit of your forecasting, you would like your time series values to be independent. Unfortunately, sometimes your values are correlated. This autocorrelation will have an impact on your ability to interpret what the data is telling you. Autocorrelation refers to the correlation between a time series variable and its own lagged values […]

The bad news is that you have problems to solve. The good news is that there are a number of simple, yet powerful tools that can help you. The 8D process is one of them.

An underlying assumption for the use of many statistical tools is that your data is normally distributed. But, how do you know? The A-square calculation for the Anderson Darling Normality Test will tell you.

Even a little bit of leftovers each day can add up to something big. That’s the basic principle and motivation behind accessory planning. The whole purpose of this activity is to find ways to use what would otherwise be wasted to generate further value. Overview: What is accessory planning? Most companies engage in accessory planning […]

Is assignable cause a bad thing? No, it’s a signal something happened in your process that you didn’t expect. It could be good or bad, but you should find out what happened.