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Full and Fractional Factorial Test Design

Posted on July 29, 2008  Comments (0)

An Essential Primer on Full and Fractional Factorial Test Design

Since full factorial gathers additional data, it reveals all possible interactions, but as seen by the numbers above, there is a trade-off. More data equals more information but more data also equals a longer test duration. The minimum data requirements for full factorial are very high since you are showing every experiment.

Even if you are using full factorial to get the same amount of information as a fractional factorial test, it will take more time since you need more data to see statistically relevant differences between the many experiments. You might be wondering how fractional factorial can be accurate if interactions are possible?

Random interactions of high relevance are very rare, especially when looking for interactions of more than 2 factors. You really need to design tests where you look for meaningful interactions that are based on true business requirements rather than hoping for a random and low influence interaction between a red button, a hero shot and a headline.

I am a fan of design of experiments as long time readers know (see posts on design of experiments).

Some good resources for more on the topics discussed above: What Can You Find Out From 8 and 16 Experimental Runs? by George Box – Statistics for Experimenters – Design of Experiments in Advertising.

Related: Google Website Optimizer – factorial experiment articles – Using Design of Experiments – Marketers Are Embracing Statistical Design of Experiments

Department of Defense Lean Six Sigma

Posted on June 5, 2008  Comments (0)

Gordon England, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, signed a directive establishing policy and assigning responsibilities to institutionalize the effort throughout DoD. See a webcast of his speech on lean six sigma to a DoD conference on continuous process improvement.

Leading Business Transformation the “Lean” Way

Since it began employing LSS, the Department of the Navy (DON) has completed 1,700 Black Belt/Green Belt projects and over 2,000 Kaizen events (i.e., action-oriented events designed to improve existing processes). Initial projects were designed to build confidence and gain momentum for success in high-impact core business value streams. The DON’s total of 3,399 trained LSS Green Belts exceeds the Secretary’s goal of 2,000 by the end of 2006, and of the 935 trained LSS Black Belts in the DON, 93 have attained American Society for Quality (ASQ) Black Belt certification.

Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) joined with Raytheon to complete an LSS project, which ultimately saved $133.5M across the 2006 FYDP and $421M over the life of the Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) Block II program. The integrated product team developed a three-tier approach to reducing weapon unit cost over a two-year period. Success of the JSOW program has led to development of a follow-on Block III weapon system.

The Marine Corps is applying LSS concepts, analytic techniques, and tools to improve the process for identifying, evaluating and acquiring critically needed warfighting equipment. Initial analysis focused on the evaluation stage, where improvements reduced the time required for this step by 35% – from 131 days to 85 days – and identified savings valued at $135K per year.

The first LSS initiative for Army aviation scheduled maintenance was deemed a success and signals a more efficient future for maintaining the Fort Rucker helicopter fleet. More than 32 days of scheduled maintenance were saved during the first LSS effort for Aviation Unit Maintenance involving UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter scheduled maintenance. The first helicopter inducted into the newly developed process was returned to flying status in just 18 days, which included a four-day break for the Fourth of July weekend. That is a 67% improvement in phase flow efficiency from the previous average time of more than 50 days of phase cycle maintenance for the UH-60.

See: online six sigma resources and lean manufacturing resources from the Curious Cat management improvement web site.

Related: Government Lean Six Sigma – Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site – Transformation Through Lean Six Sigma – Army Business Transformation – History Of Quality Management Online – More Lean Government – Army Lean Six Sigma
Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin by William G. Hunter, Jan O’Neill, and Carol Wallen, June 1986.

Management Improvement Carnival #33

Posted on April 15, 2008  Comments (0)

Shaun Sayers is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #33 on the Capable blog, some of the highlights include

Lean Six Sigma Case Studies

Posted on February 27, 2008  Comments (1)

ValuMetrix Services provides some really nice lean six sigma case studies. Simple short but still with enough detail to actually provide some sense of what is going on.

While on the topic of online case studies let me plug the Curious Cat management improvement library. I think it is one of the more valuable resources for management improvement offered on the Curious Cat sites. Library shelves: health care articles, lean manufacturing articles, six sigma articles, newly added articles…

via: Daily Kaizen

Related: Curious Cat Management Search – Management Consulting, what does the web site show? – Lean Management Case Study

Management Improvement

Posted on November 27, 2005  Comments (6)

Lean Manufacturing Visionary Jim Womack On Frontiers Of Lean Thinking, webcast and additional questions and answers:

Question: For a firm seeking to improve — what comes first? Six Sigma quality or lean implementation?

James Womack: Agh! These are all the same thing. You need to start with the value stream for very product, draw a map of its current state, and ask about each step: Is it valuable? Is it capable? Is it available? Is it adequate? Is it flexible? Then ask whether each step flows smoothly to the next but only at the pull of the customer as the process approaches perfection. Doing this simple exercise wraps together everything you need to know about TQM, TPM, TPS, Six Sigma, TOC, etc

I believe while they are similar to varying degree they are not the same thing. They may have similar goals – they are largely focused at improving performance of the organization (but even how they would measure success is different). And when implemented well each of these methods have value. However what is done in an organization focused on six sigma is different than one focused on lean thinking.
Continue reading →

Box on Quality

Posted on October 11, 2005  Comments (2)

Bill Hunter and George Box

Dr. George Box is not as well known in the general management community as his ideas merit (in my biased opinion – photo of Bill Hunter and George Box). He is well know in the statistics field as one of the leading statistical minds. Box on Quality is an excellent book that gathers his essays from his 65th to 80th year. The book has just been issued in paperback (which helps as the hardback was pricey).

While some of the essays are aimed at a reader with an advanced understanding of statistics, many of the articles are aimed at any manager attempting to apply Quality Management principles (SPC, Deming, process improvement, six sigma, etc.). An except from the book provides a table of contents and an introduction.

Some of the articles from the book are available online. I encourage you to take a look at several of the articles and then go ahead and add this book to your prized management resources, if you find them worthwhile.

Deming and Six Sigma

Posted on July 15, 2005  Comments (1)

The first Curious Cat Management Improvement blog post was on the Six Sigma and Deming Philosophies

Recently the Deming Electronic Network has returned to this topic.

The Quality Advisor web site has an article on this topic: Deming and Six Sigma (broken link so removed):

The Six Sigma process can be seen to offer a parallel to Deming’s Plan-Do-Study-Act Cycle, although Six Sigma brings experimental design and regression analysis to the forefront in the “plan” phase. Six Sigma also emphasizes design as a key function for achieving six sigma performance levels, and devotes attention to planning the design phase of production. Deming, too, emphasized “Plan” in his four-state cycle, promoting the importance of establishing a relationship between desired output and required input as well as necessary production processes.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the approaches is Deming’s focus on the responsibilities of management, outlined in his “The 14 Obligations of Management,” and “The Deadly Diseases.” The Six Sigma approach, by contrast, lays out a more rigid structure of roles and responsibilities throughout an organization, including executive management, a senior champion, deployment champions, project champions, deployment master black belts, project master black belts, project black belts, process owners, and six sigma green belts.

What would Deming do? (link broken so I removed it) by David R. Schwinn

I started thinking that it might be interesting to ask, “What would Deming do (WWDD)?” as it relates to Six Sigma theory and practice…

The site doesn’t provide links form one part to the next so here those links are:

More links broken so I removed them. You know people that manage web sites really shouldn’t waste incoming links by breaking them. I keep hoping finally people will adopt this simple idea that has been well know for more than a decade but still people keep doing it.

Marketers Are Embracing Statistical Design of Experiments

Posted on May 27, 2005  Comments (2)

Marketers Are Embracing Statistical Design of Experiments (site broke link so I removed it) 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.)
…
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:

Management Improvement Books

Posted on March 21, 2005  Comments (0)

My recent post on Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery , 2nd Edition reminds me I have not mentioned other good books that have been published recently. Three great books published last year are:

And Beating the System: Using Creativity to Outsmart Bureaucracies by Russell L. Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin will be available soon.

For more great management improvement books see Curious Cat Management Improvement Books.

Who Influences Your Thinking?

Posted on March 10, 2005  Comments (3)

Comments on Who Influences Your Thinking? – Survey results -

> 1. Are people getting most of their information
> from other sources?
That would be my guess.

Similar to the phenomenon of “the long tail” which is an interesting topic in its own right. We tend to focus on the popular few (books, musicians, movies, authors, computer programs…) but often the sum of the less popular many is more significant. See:

  • The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, Wired, Oct 2004 “The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are”
  • Continued discussion of the Amazon figures in a Chiris Anderson’s blog. “I’ve now spoken to Jeff Bezos (and others) about this. He doesn’t have a hard figure for the percentage of sales of products not available offline, but reckons that it’s closer to 25-30%.”
  • The long tail – a secret sauce for companies like Amazon.com, Netflix and Apple Computer, Motley Fool, NPR Audio Recording

Getting back to the question raised by the “Who Influences Your Thinking” post; More importantly I believe they (we) are just failing to get all we should.
Continue reading →

Statistics for Experimenters – Second Edition

Posted on March 8, 2005  Comments (2)

Buy Statistics for Experimenters

The classic Statistics for Experimenters has been updated by George Box and Stu Hunter, two of the three original authors. Bill Hunter, who was my father, and the other author, died in 1986. Order online: Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery , 2nd Edition by George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter, William G. Hunter.
I happen to agree with those who call this book a classic, however, I am obviously biased.

Google Scholar citations for the first edition of Statistics for Experimenters.
Citations in Cite Seer to the first edition.

The first edition includes the text of Experiment by Cole Porter. In 1978 finding a recording of this song was next to impossible. Now Experiment can be heard on the De-Lovely soundtrack.

Text from the publisher on the 2nd Edition:
Rewritten and updated, this new edition of Statistics for Experimenters adopts the same approaches as the landmark First Edition by teaching with examples, readily understood graphics, and the appropriate use of computers. Catalyzing innovation, problem solving, and discovery, the Second Edition provides experimenters with the scientific and statistical tools needed to maximize the knowledge gained from research data, illustrating how these tools may best be utilized during all stages of the investigative process. The authors’ practical approach starts with a problem that needs to be solved and then examines the appropriate statistical methods of design and analysis.
Continue reading →

Management Improvement History

Posted on September 23, 2004  Comments (4)

Originally posted to the Deming Electronic Network, 22 Sep 1999, in reponse to this message

I would like to say that I think it is good that we have disagreements on the DEN. I think it is a strength of the DEN, not a weakness. However, I think we sometimes get to personal with no real purpose. One example of this, for me, is: “Well, I guess we knew different Demings. Mine was a teacher named Dr. W. Edwards Deming.” I doubt this statement is meant to be taken literally, and if it is not I do not see what it adds to the discussion. I point this out not because I think this is some bad act that should be punished but that I think we need to continue to develop a sense of how we wish to express our disagreements and I think that we should try to do so more constructively.

For the past 60 years we’ve been looking for the magic bullet that will improve the quality of our products, services and lives. In the 1940s, we applied statistics through sampling, SPC and design of experiments to improve our products. In the 1950s, we used quality cost and total quality control to bring about quality improvement. In the 1960s, zero defects and MIL-Q-9858A drove the quality improvement process. In the 1970s, quality circles, process qualification and supplier qualification became key quality issues. In the 1980s, employee training in problem solving, team activities and just-in-time inventory were the things to do.”

I find this statement so far from the truth that it would seriously damage any PDSA with this as an accepted assessment of history. I do not believe Deming had such an inaccurate view (of course I may be wrong). I do believe we need to improve our practice of Quality (and to do that we need to understand what happened in the past and why it was not more successful). The idea that Design of Experiments (DoE) was at the core of some Quality Movement to me is not at all accurate. Continue reading →

Six Sigma and Deming Philosophies

Posted on August 27, 2004  Comments (0)

Post of 23 Oct 2003 message to the Deming Electronic Network to this blog. View DEN thread

My oversimplified view is that the Deming philosophy aims to improve the system and Six Sigma is about improving within the current system. I think several Six Sigma efforts over the past 10 years have improved upon what many organizations tried with TQM, in large part by

1) putting substantial effort (significant training and application) into using statistical tools to improve

and 2) more focus on results (especially short term results) Continue reading →

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