Content by Donald J. Wheeler
Mon, 12/02/2024 - 12:03
Managers are commonly fed a diet of report-card data. These data have usually been aggregated into summaries, averages, and totals to characterize the big picture. As useful as such summaries can be, they can also be an obstacle to an effective…
Mon, 11/18/2024 - 12:03
An engineer once told me, “I work on project teams that have an average half-life of two weeks, implementing solutions with an average half-life of two weeks.” Time after time, and in place after place, our improvement efforts often fall short of…
Wed, 10/16/2024 - 12:03
All improvement efforts require a framework. No matter what we’re doing, we all need some way to align our efforts and focus on a specific objective. During my 50 years in this business, I’ve seen people use many different improvement frameworks.…
Wed, 08/21/2024 - 12:03
The objective of all improvement projects should be to improve the overall process. Everything else should be secondary to this objective. If you improve the efficiency of a support process, or even a portion of the core process, but at the same…
Wed, 07/03/2024 - 12:03
The four common capability and performance indexes collectively contain all of the summary information about process predictability, process conformity, and process aim that can be expressed numerically. As a result, any additional capability…
Wed, 06/12/2024 - 12:03
In May 1924, Walter Shewhart wrote a memo that contained the first example of a process behavior chart (i.e., a “control chart”). It was a chart for individual values that would be known today as a p-chart. Shewhart’s insight was that “three-sigma”…
Mon, 05/06/2024 - 12:03
One hundred years ago this month, Walter Shewhart wrote a memo that contained the first process behavior chart. In recognition of this centennial, this column reviews four different applications of the techniques that grew out of that memo.
The…
Wed, 04/03/2024 - 12:03
When presented with a collection of data from operations or production, many will start their analysis by computing descriptive statistics and fitting a probability model to the data. But before you do this, there’s an easy test that you need to…
Wed, 03/06/2024 - 12:03
Over the past two months we’ve considered the properties of lognormal and gamma probability models. Both of these families contain the normal distribution as a limit. To complete our survey of widely used probability models, this column will look at…
Wed, 02/07/2024 - 12:03
Clear thinking and simplicity of analysis require concise, clear, and correct notions about probability models and how to use them. Here, we’ll examine the basic properties of the family of gamma and chi-square distributions that play major roles in…
