Category: Concepts

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.

The Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test, sometimes called the Mann Whitney Wilcoxon Test or Mann Whitney U test, is used to test whether two independent samples come from the same population or two different populations. 

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.

Fishbone diagrams are used to drill down to the root cause of a problem. The diagram looks like the bones of a fish, where each main bone represents a possible category of root cause, and subsequent drilling down is shown as smaller and smaller bones.

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 […]

Sigma is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet and is used as a common notation in statistics as a measure of summation and variation.

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

Trimmed mean is defined as the mean calculated by trimming 5% data sets from the top and bottom of data sets

An analytical management tool used to develop a basic outline of core processes and help the analysts consider what may go wrong with each step.

In business, your profit will be dependent upon several variables such as material and labor costs. Other variables will also be dependent upon several other independent variables.

Does Going to Gemba sound like a nice trip to an exotic locale? While not a fancy foreign destination, Gemba is going to where the work is done to learn more about the process. Let’s take a deeper look into what Gemba is about. 

While you may not be familiar with the specifics of Z st, you’ve almost certainly heard of it. It’s a measure of the distance between two data points on a distribution curve, and it can be used in many different ways to enhance your understanding of how processes work.

Being able to provide your customers with quality goods and services should be a primary goal of any business. In order to be able to provide quality, inspections need to be part of your process.

One of the most famous sayings in the Star Wars films is May the Force be with you. This saying may also apply to making changes in your organization. Let’s see what forces you need to identify and deal with when using a force field analysis to manage change.

Your Six Sigma project will usually focus on a process with customers who directly receive the output of your process. But there are also others who will be impacted and have a stake in the outcome of your project. They are called stakeholders, and you need to understand them.