Our library of articles provides continuous improvement knowledge base and valuable insights for those involved in quality improvement activities, for business professionals who want to obtain better performance results, for team leaders who want to motivate their staff and increase their performance, and for students who want to increase their knowledge in quality and improvement techniques.
We hope that you find our articles helpful and informative. We would like to hear from you if there is a topic out there that we have not written about and you think we should. So please feel free to get in touch!
The products and services delivered by any organization are the result of processes. Any business activity whether it is industrial, commercial or service-oriented can be considered as a process. Managing these processes is a key to success for any organization. A process can be defined is a set of steps designed to produce a product or service to add value to a customer. It starts with a business goal and ends with the achievement of the that goal.
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A Four Field Matrix is an effective model for planning, organizing and making decisions. It is a two-dimensional chart that consists of four equal-sized quadrants. Each of the quadrants will describe a different aspect of information. Sometimes it is referred to as the Four Quadrant Matrix or the Four Celled Matrix.
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Graphing the data can be utilized for both historical data already available and when analyzing the data resulting from live data collection activities. Of course, you need to pick the right graphical tool as there are a lot of different ways to plot your data. A number of commonly used graphical tools will be covered here. However, note that if one graph fails to reveal anything useful, try another one.
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Projects are time bound by nature. They have to be implemented within a specific period of time. Project Closing is the final phase and an important aspect of the project life cycle. It is, however, one of the most neglected project management activities. A Project Closure is often used in this phase to formally close projects. It used to summarize project results and validates the accomplishment of project goals.
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5S is an improvement tool for organizing and maintaining a disciplined and productive workplace. It helps creating a better working environment, reduces waste while improving efficiency, safety and quality. 5S represents five simple practices that starts with the letter ‘S’. It is commonly applied by manufacturing facilities in production lines, storage areas, maintenance areas, and office areas. It is now being increasingly applied by a wide variety of industries including health care, education, hospitality and retail.
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A Best Practice is that practice that has been proven to achieve the best results. It represents creative solutions to common problems and has the potential to be replicated internally and externally. Companies are able to learn from other successful organizations by adopting their best practices without the need to reinvent the wheel. Companies can also develop and share their own best practices and innovative solutions. Read more »»
Standard work means working on standards to produce correct and consistent results. It represents the best sequence and the most efficient methods to perform a process. It is considered a way to achieve the highest possible degree of consistency in any process. The purpose is to ensure that everything is done by everyone in a similar manner and carry out the work that achieves the highest quality, best service and lowest cost possible. Read more »»
The Normal Distribution is the commonest and the most useful continuous probability distribution. Many statistical tests require that the distribution is normal or nearly normal. Several tools are available to assess the normality of data including: using a histogram to visually explore the data, producing a normal probability plot, and carrying out an Anderson-Darling normality test. All these tools are easy to use in Minitab statistical software. Read more »»
There are different shapes, models and classifications of probability distributions including the ones discussed in the probability distributions article. It is always a good practice to know the distribution of your data before proceeding with your analysis. Once you find the appropriate model, you can then perform your statistical analysis in the right manner. Minitab can be used to find the appropriate probability distribution of your data. Read more »»
Continuous distributions describe variables that take values from a continuous range and can be measured with any degree of accuracy. The commonest and the most useful continuous distribution is the normal distribution. The Normal Distribution is a symmetrical probability distribution where most results are located in the middle and few are spread on both sides. It has the shape of a bell and can entirely be described by its mean and standard deviation. Read more »»
Most improvement projects and scientific research studies are conducted with sample data rather than with data from an entire population. A Probability Distribution is a way to shape the sample data to make predictions and draw conclusions about an entire population. It refers to the frequency at which some events or experiments occur. It helps finding all the possible values a random variable can take between the minimum and maximum statistically possible values. Read more »»
Minitab is a statistical software that allows you to enter your data to perform a wide range of statistical analyses on that data. It can be used to calculate many types of descriptive statistics including the ones discussed in the Descriptive Statistics article which can tell you a lot about your data in order to make more rational decisions. Descriptive statistics summaries in Minitab can be either quantitative or visual. Read more »»