Every once in a while, people ask about acceptance sampling plans and I get all riled up. We all know (especially in this political season) that humans are addicted to their indignation high, so here’s your fix for today.
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By the time you read this, the amazingly long U.S. presidential election will be over. All U.S. citizens will be wandering around aimlessly bumping into objects, pressing their hands to the sides of their heads as the indignation poisons slowly leave their bodies, leaving them with a hangover-like malaise and an intermittent need to babble a mishmash of campaign slogans. So, to cheer you up, I present you with the rest of the story I began last month about acceptance sampling.
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What purpose, if any, does Six Sigma serve in economic downturns? Full disclosure: I teach and consult in Six Sigma and related areas, and you’re reading this article because you’re interested in Six Sigma, so we may not be the most objective people to assess this, but in this article, I will do my best to find the truth.
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As you read this you will, no doubt, have already made (and perhaps broken) your New Year’s resolutions. I’d like to propose one that we, as business leaders, have a special responsibility to follow and whose failure we hear about in the news almost every day.
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Many people go through a point in their lives where they question the beliefs they hold most dear. Then there are those who question the entire basis for statistical process control (SPC) once they have learned the statistical basis for them. I can’t help you with the former, but I have something to say to the latter after the break.
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One of the most frequent questions I get from Black Belts and Green Belts I train is about the characteristics of a good Six Sigma project, particularly a first project. Define, measure, analyze, improve, control (DMAIC) is a procedure that is useful for certain types of projects and terrible for others. What makes a good DMAIC project?
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A colleague of mine made an interesting point about how we teach and learn experimental design techniques, and I thought I'd explore the subject further. He observed that the order that we teach statistics is almost exactly opposite of how one would actually use them. So this month I will describe the different tools and how they would be used in the actual order you might use them.
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