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 analysis.

Time: We all have a sense of it, an innate feel for it. We see it and use it every day.

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 expectations and fad

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is shaping up to be one of the closest in recent history, with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump locked in a dead heat in many polls.

Most quality practitioners are familiar with the Taguchi loss function, which contends that the cost of any deviation from the nominal follows a quadratic model.

The objective of all improvement projects should be to improve the overall process. Everything else should be secondary to this objective.

Recently, I wrote about the process capability index and tolerance interval.

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.

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.

Walter A. Shewhart is lauded as the Father of Statistical Process Control (SPC) and is perhaps best remembered for the SPC control chart.