Tweet I was able to attend a class that was sponsored by localU which was sponsored by Google, the Small Business Administration, and a local Austin business organization.  It was a great set of presenters.  The session lasted 4 hours and had 6 speakers from google and other firms and consultants in the web optimization [...]

Tweet Not all processes have true customer derived specifications.  These processes are difficult to report a capability value. The easiest method to report the capability of a process without a true specification is to just report what the range of typical values.  We recommend a median value as the most common output followed by a [...]

Tweet I have been watching the Olympics and have recognized that there are two kinds of scoring;  Continuous (time) and attribute (scoring in gymnastics and other non-timed sports). This difference has a clear difference in the attitude towards the scores as I see in businesses that use attribute metrics.  Both argue about the judges and [...]

Tweet First of all, a 30,000-foot-level control chart is what Smarter Solutions teaches for baselining a DMAIC project metric and for use in scorecards at a business level.  While I will not go deep into the why we use this concept instead of the more common Shewhart SPC methods, I will cover it a bit. [...]

Tweet I was at a specialty grocer here in Texas, Central Market, to pick up some ingredients to make Paella and when checking out I saw that the register reported the checker’s primary metric, items per minute scanned at checkout.  My checker ran at 26.1 items per minute. I guess when performance measures make it [...]

Tweet While Forrest and I were working today, we talked about Red/Yellow/Green (RYG) scorecards and how to show a company that they can do better. I know that everyone likes the RYG scorecard format because of the stop-light concept where red is stop and green is go, but there are inherent issues with this concept. [...]

Tweet 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 [...]

Tweet 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 [...]

Tweet 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 [...]

Tweet 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 [...]