Marketers Are Embracing Statistical Design of Experiments

Marketers Are Embracing Statistical Design of Experiments by Richard Burnham.

Crayola® conducts an e-mail marketing DOE to attract parents and teachers to their new Internet site. The company discovers a combination of factors that makes their new e-mail pitch three-and-a-half times more effective than the control. (Harvard Business Review, October 2001, “Boost Your Marketing ROI with Experimental Design,” Almquist, Wyner.)
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Marketers can’t always be certain what triggers buyers to respond. In the past, we were always admonished to test-test-test, but only one factor at a time – relying on our gut feelings and uncertain hopes. With DOE, marketers have replaced voodoo with the science of statistics.

For more on Design of Experiments see:

• Curious Cat Glossary - Design of Experiments
• Curious Cat Directory of Design of Experiments Links
• Curious Cat Library - Design of Experiments Articles

A Lean Walk Through History

A Lean Walk Through History by Jim Womack
author of Lean Thinking Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, 2003 and The Machine That Changed the World The Story of Lean Production by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos, 1991.

Once you are sensitized to the depth of lean history, along with its many advances and setbacks, it’s easy to begin filling in some of the other milestones:

By 1765, French general Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval had grasped the significance of standardized designs and interchangeable parts to facilitate battlefield repairs. (Actually doing this cost-effectively in practice was another matter and required another 125 years.)

By 1807 Marc Brunel in England had devised equipment for making simple wooden items like rope blocks for the Royal Navy using 22 kinds of machines that produced identical items in process sequence one at a time.

By 1822 Thomas Blanchard at the Springfield Armory in the U.S. had devised a set of 14 machines and laid them out in a cellular arrangement that made it possible to make more complex shapes like gunstocks for rifles. A block of wood was placed in the first machine, the lever was thrown, and the water-powered machine automatically removed some of the wood using a profile tracer on a reference piece.

Six Sigma at the Kennedy Space Center

The Lessons of Six Sigma: Management tool helped refocus priorities, by Napoleon Carroll and Christa Casleton :

Process ownership is not a recognizable role in the CFO organization; it doesn’t fit anywhere in the standard position descriptions, and there’s no spot for it on the organization chart. After rigorous analysis, it was clear to us that unclear process ownership was one of our major problems.

Lean Manufacturing is Better Business for Ariens

Lean Manufacturing is Better Business for Ariens:

Gone are the long assembly lines, the hallmark of the Henry Ford method of mass production, and gone are warehouses and semitrailer trucks loaded with inventory.

Iran Society for Quality - Blog

Iran Society for Quality - Blog. I can't read most of the site, but they seem to have a blog.

Six Sigma Software

Six Sigma Software:

In the future, the best business software companies will distinguish themselves by producing industrial-strength, bulletproof code - code that approaches Six Sigma standards.

Why Go Through the Painful Performance Process

Why Go Through the Painful Performance Process:

The performance management blog points to an interesting study by PeopleIQ that says that Only 13 percent of employees and managers and 6 percent of CEOs think their organization's performance appraisal is useful. And 88 percent say their current performance appraisal negatively impacts their opinion of HR.

See also the previous Curious Cat post on Performance Without Appraisal.

The Pitfalls of Six Sigma

The Pitfalls of Six Sigma:

Six sigma has strong advocates in the manufacturing world for its ability to help factories get lean, but many companies are feeling that their time and financial investment in six sigma has been wasted. Problems with implementation have caused financial and organizational setbacks. Some companies are strongly suggesting, and at times actually demanding their suppliers to adopt six sigma in their operations or run the risk of losing business. Many organizations have combined their lean initiatives with six sigma and are progressing well, while others with poor implementations and abandoned programs risk being left in the dust.

Thinking Lean

Thinking Lean by Doug Rich and Dave Bassett, from the May 2005 edition of Manufacturing Engineering.

The first thing the kaizen initiative did was to simulate the process layout. This was accomplished through a series of steps ranging from AutoCAD and paper dolls to an actual scale model set up on a portion of the shop floor. By going through this exercise, we were able to review the logical flow of all process steps, which helped ensure that we reduced the distance traveled by each spindle during the manufacturing process. At one point we even had a person walk the entire production cycle of the spindle manufacturing process so we could track the actual distance that each part traveled from start to finish.

Competing on the Basis of Time

Competing on the Basis of Time:

The way to get rid of the big delay at verification is to move testing closer to coding – much closer. In fact, testing should happen immediately upon coding; if possible the test should have been written before the code. New code should be integrated into the overall system several times a day, with a suite of automated unit tests run each time. Acceptance tests for a feature should pass as soon as the feature is complete, and regression testing should be run on the integrated code daily or perhaps weekly.

From the Poppendieck web site, authors of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers.

SEC chief quotes Deming

Security and Exchange Chairman William H. Donaldson Speaks At Chartered Financial Analysts Institute Annual Conference:

This approach will, ultimately, better serve investors, and it will also gradually temper the pressures on some corporate executives to fudge the numbers. It would behoove us all to remember the words of W. Edwards Deming: “People with targets, and jobs dependent on meeting them, will probably meet the targets – even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it."

Search for Improvement With Complex Six Sigma

Search for Improvement With Complex Six Sigma by Helen D'Antoni:

To understand what companies are doing to curtail costs while improving performance, InformationWeek's sister publication, Optimize magazine, conducted a survey of 156 business-technology executives, asking them about their company's business-process frameworks, quality models, and technology standards.
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of the 156 business-technology executives surveyed by Optimize Research, fewer than 40% report their company even employs Six Sigma.

Six Sigma Propelling HSBC

Six Sigma Propelling HSBC:

HSBC Bank Malaysia Bhd, one of the leading lenders in Malaysia, aims to further propel its consumer banking business by intensifying the usage of the Six Sigma methodology.

Hands on Lean Process Improvement

Shingo’s ‘Know Why’ Hands-On Lean by Bill Waddell. From Superfactory:

The essential element here is to be sure to identify every move the part makes from receipt to finish. How you represent it on the flow chart is not important, as long as each step is clearly identified and denoted whether it is value adding or not. It is also important that you develop the chart by personally walking the flow. Do not rely on a router or someone’s idea about how the process is supposed to flow.
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The primary message I am trying to send is that cycle time reduction efforts will generate almost immediate results if you use Shingo’s Why logic to deploy the right tool to the biggest problem first. The method and logic are simple. Every plant can have multiple improvement efforts in multiple processes going on simultaneously that all make sense.

New Management Blog Focus

We will use this blog to note blog post, articles and management resources. With this blog we will focus on serving as a central point to keep up with blogs and online articles relating to Management Improvement: Customer Focus, Process Improvement, Deming, Lean Thinking, Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, Statistical Tools, Quality Tools, Agile Management...

This is the newest edition of the Curious Cat Blog Roster, which also includes:

• curiouscat.com Blog - focused on management improvement, economics, investment, travel, the internet and the curiouscat.com web site. Many of these posts consist of our own commentary.
• Curious Cat Science Blog - post on Innovation, Research and Education in Science and Engineering
• Curiouscat Articles and Links Blog - posts about blog posts, online articles and web resources of general interest (largely focused on the internet, economics, privacy and business).