I promised a few Master Black Belts to provide information of writing Macros in Minitab.  They have described a real labor intensive effort to produce scorecards using Excel macros.  I do understand the issues. You can do a lot with Minitab Macros.  First, there is a help function just for macro functions.  Now that Minitab [...]

During a Master Black Belt class we examined a data set that involved attendance at ASQ meetings.  We were treating this data as continuous data, which was challenged.  Since the data is a count of people, it is truly an attribute count metric.  It is probability following a Poisson distribution, but I am still going [...]

The Wall Street Journal had an article this weekend titled “When Risk is a Red-Meat Issue” by Carl Bialik on March 23, 2012.  This may be behind the WSJ pay wall, but if you can read it, please do. The article starts with a study that concluded that eating one serving of red meat per [...]

I visited a client last week to work with their black belt candidates.  It was a great visit because their students were doing very well and I found very few conceptual errors.  Most will be getting certification within 6 months of the training.  Quite good. But one student presented a copy of a daily production [...]

A past student talked to me about a request from their boss to generate a project list for the year for the department.  In this case it is an IT department with a number of trained belts in a large multinational.  The past student has been working as a senior technologist and MBB for only [...]

You will find a lot of complaints about Red/Yellow/Green (RYG) scorecards on this Blog and in the writings of Forrest Breyfogle. Most of the complaints relate to the decision to set the color based on an arbitrary set of goals. The adoption of the RYG format implies a stop sign type behavior: Stop if Red, [...]

Jon Hansen, a past client and consultant to our company posted a blog on SEO efforts, stating that they do not work.  It can be found at  his blog with a title of Actual examples demonstrating why SEO is more hype than substance.  I wrote my blog to show that our experience follows his. Like [...]

When I read the book “Real Numbers, management accounting in a lean environment,” by Cunningham and Fiume, the authors make an excellent case why a business that measures performance as a variance to a plan or variance to a goal will develop performance problems.  If you have not read the book, you may want to.  [...]

I am working with a client that is trying to develop an evaluation system for its teachers.  The goal is to use student test scores as part of the teacher evaluation.  The concept is valid, of course, but how do you weight that input as a measure of the teacher skill? Schools are a unique [...]

Early this week Smarter Solutions attended a CFO conference in Dallas.  It was a great experience to become part of discussions on topics that Chief Financial Officers are interested in. I was surprised how isolated the CFO folks I talked with as related to non-financial business issues.  There focus, in this conference was that the [...]