LSS Academy Series Review – Six Sigma Edition

First of all, Happy Easter!  My family and I were in Oklahoma the last few days.  As is very typical with me during road trips, I began to think about this blog.  I am not sure if this is entirely healthy (me always thinking about this blog) but I guess that’s a story for another day.

Ahhh, Quiet Time

In any event, this quiet time (yes, the kids were sleeping) allowed me to reminisce on what we have discussed over the past year or so on the blog. 

I quickly came to the realization that I have written quite a few “series” related to various lean and six sigma topics.  So, to save you the time of digging through the archives I thought I would share a few of these with you this evening.

Let’s start with six sigma related series tonight… and then later this week we will dive into lean.  So you guessed it, this will be a 2 part series where we talk about series.  Cool, eh?

Descriptive Statistics

In August of last year I wrote a series on descriptive statistics.  Don’t lie… makes you want to yawn, right?  Thanks to all the crappy stats professors out there this topic definitely has a bad reputation. 

Well, with this known, I attempted to gain it some much needed street cred back.  In part 1 we started off talking about the 3 measures of central tendency.  Then, in part 2 we got all crazy and dove into the 3 measures of dispersion. 

 Control Charts

If you think of yourself as a “lean guy” or “lean gal” you may wonder what benefit (if any) this six sigma stuff can be to you. 

Well, while control charts are not a six sigma only tool… they are heavily stressed during a six sigma practitioners development.  With this said, if you are into lean and not using control charts you are missing out on one very powerful tool. 

In part 1 of this series, we started slowly as we discussed the history of control charts.  Then, in part 2 we talked about the controls charts used with attribute data – namely the p, c, and u charts.  Finally, in part 3 we learned about my personal favorite, the Individual and Moving Range control chart.

Fun with Confidence Intervals

When people mention the words confidence intervals I cannot lie…  I get excited.  But, alas, I realize I am a little weird.  So in order to make this topic a bit more digestable for normal people… I wrote a 2 part series. 

In part 1 we dipped our foot in the water and explained the difference between population and sample statistics.  Then, in part 2 we got into things far more deeply. 

Simple Linear Regression

One of the first series I attempted focused in on the very popular topic of regression.  This is another topic those mean college profs did their best to make us hate.  Well… hate no more friends. 

In part 1, of this 3 part series we learned about some of the basics of regression.  Then, in part 2 we talked about two very cool concepts – R Sq (adj) and P values.  Finally, in part 3 we talked about residuals and the ultra important differences between correlation, causation, and extrapolation.  If you click on only only one link in this article.. click this last one.

Hangin’ with Taguchi

While not a traditional series, the articles I wrote on Taguchi methods have been quite popular as determined by their number of page views.  So I thought I would conclude with these.

My first Taguchi related article touched on the famous Taguchi Loss Function (in addition to why so many folks seem to hate Mr. Taguchi’s guts).  Next, we discussed one of my favorite process capability measures, the Taguchi Index – Cpm.  Finally, I later shared some insight into my favorite design of experiment – the Taguchi L18 DOE.

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Next up we I will share some of the lean related series from the past year.  But the links above should keep you plenty busy until then.

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