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Strangest Capability Study: Super-Zooper-Flooper-Do Broom Boom
by Matthew Barsalou, guest bloggerThe great Dr. Seuss tells of Mr. Plunger who is the custodian at Diffendoofer School on the corner of Dinkzoober and Dinzott in the town of Dinkerville. The good Mr....
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Five Reasons Why a Value Stream Map Is Like a Pirate’s Treasure Map (and One...
Ahoy, matey! Ye’ve come to the right place to learn about Value Stream Maps (VSM). Just as a treasure map can lead a band o’ pirates to buried treasures, so too can the VSM lead a process improvement...
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Statistical Tools for Process Validation, Stage 1: Process Design
Process validation is vital to the success of companies that manufacture drugs and biological products for people and animals. According to the FDA guidelines published by the U.S. Department of Health...
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How to Use Data to Understand and Resolve Differences in Opinion, Part 1
Opinions, they say, are like certain anatomical features: everybody has one. Usually that's fine—if everybody thought the same way, life would be pretty boring—but many business decisions are based on...
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DMAIC Tools and Techniques: The Measure Phase
In my last post on DMAIC tools for the Define phase, we reviewed various graphs and stats typically used to define project goals and customer deliverables. Let’s now move along to the tools you can use...
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Creating a Waterfall Chart in Minitab
While there are many graph options available in Minitab’s Graph menu, there is no direct option to generate a waterfall chart. This type of graph helps visualize the cumulative effect of sequentially...
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How to Use Data to Understand and Resolve Differences in Opinion, Part 2
Previously, I discussed how business problems arise when people have conflicting opinions about a subjective factor, such as whether something is the right color or not, or whether a job applicant is...
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The Empirical CDF, Part 1: What's a CDF?
T'was the season for toys recently, and Christmas day found me playing around with a classic, the Etch-a-Sketch. As I noodled with the knobs, I had a sudden flash of recognition: my drawing reminded me...
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So Why Is It Called "Regression," Anyway?
Did you ever wonder why statistical analyses and concepts often have such weird, cryptic names?One conspiracy theory points to the workings of a secret committee called the ICSSNN. The International...
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How to Use Data to Understand and Resolve Differences in Opinion, Part 3
In the first part of this series, we saw how conflicting opinions about a subjective factor can create business problems. In part 2, we used Minitab's Assistant feature to set up an attribute agreement...
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Five Ways to Make Your Control Charts More Effective
Have you ever wished your control charts were better? More effective and user-friendly? Easier to understand and act on? In this post, I'll share some simple ways to make SPC monitoring more...
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Statistical Tools for Process Validation, Stage 2: Process Qualification
In its industry guidance to companies that manufacture drugs and biological products for people and animals, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends three stages for process validation. While...
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How Taguchi Designs Differ from Factorial Designs
Genichi Taguchi is famous for his pioneering methods of robust quality engineering. One of the major contributions that he made to quality improvement methods is Taguchi designs.Designed experiments...
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How to Compute Probabilities
Have you ever wanted to know the odds of something happening, or not happening? It's the kind of question that students are frequently asked to calculate by hand in introductory statistics classes, and...
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A Field Guide to Statistical Distributions
by Matthew Barsalou, guest blogger. The old saying “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, then it must be a duck” may be appropriate in bird watching; however, the same...
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3 Things a Histogram Can Tell You
Histograms are one of the most common graphs used to display numeric data. Anyone who takes a statistics course is likely to learn about the histogram, and for good reason: histograms are easy to...
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10 Tips to Increase your Minitab Efficiency
by Rehman Khan, guest bloggerThere are many articles giving Minitab tips already, so to be different I have done mine in the style of my books, which use example-based learning. All ten tips are shown...
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Chi-Square Analysis: Powerful, Versatile, Statistically Objective
To make objective decisions about the processes that are critical to your organization, you often need to examine categorical data. You may know how to use a t-test or ANOVA when you’re comparing...
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Using Designed Experiments (DOE) to Minimize Moisture Loss
As a person who loves baking (and eating) cakes, I find it bothersome to go through all the effort of baking a cake when the end result is too dry for my taste. For that reason, I decided to use a...
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Three Common P-Value Mistakes You'll Never Have to Make
Statistics can be challenging, especially if you're not analyzing data and interpreting the results every day. Statistical software makes things easier by handling the arduous mathematical work...
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