PROCESS IMPROVEMENT & DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS – LESSONS LEARNT FROM A EUROPEAN STATISTICS CONFERENCE. I A N M O R T O N ,

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 3

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

On the 15th September of this year I went to The European Network of Business and Industrial Statisticians (ENBIS) meeting in Ankara, Turkey. I had received free entry to this conference and a prize in book tokens from Wiley - in recognition of a talk I had given to a primary school on being a statistician. The conference was attended by engineers, scientists and academics who were generally from, or working with, the service industries (e.g. hotel and leisure, telecommunications, oil and gas supply, and transport). The statistical approaches under discussion were “design of experiments” and “statistical process control”. The techniques were used by these people to reduce waste, improve processes and for quality improvement purposes.

CONTENTS

• What is ENBIS & The Greenfield Challenge

• Conference•arrangements,•people,•material•programs

• So what will you do with this learning ?

WHAT IS ENBIS ? ANDTHE GREENFIELD CHALLENGE

• Twitter – saw a tweet• International Year of Statistics 2013• ENBIS tweeted about The Greenfield Challenge

• It provides recognition of giving a presentation on statistics to non-statisticians

• In January 2013 I entered – didn’t know what prize• In August 2013 - won third prize

• book tokens• free entry to ENBIS-13 conference – checked

content• (I just needed T&S)

• ENBIS-13 in Ankara, Turkey.

HOTEL VERSUS CONFERENCE

From a development point ofview there is a lot of newconstruction in terms ofoffices, retail and housingin Ankara, Turkey. You get theimpression of affluence.

CONFERENCE ARRANGEMENTS

• Delivered my talk again

• Parallel strands of talks

• Some talks technical and detailed

• Some very practical

Some statistics ------->

CONFERENCE PEOPLE

• Keynote address – Fugee Tsung

• Video of a talk from George Box

• Talk from David Steinberg

• Tony Greenfield

• Generally• Academics• Technologists• Engineers• Chemists

• Scotland - X

This article was mentioned a few times

CONFERENCE MATERIAL COVERED• Service industries

• Statistical Process Control• Process improvement• Quality improvement

• Keywords: SPC, LEAN, Six Sigma, run charts

• Design of experiments – originally from agriculture (mainly)

• But now used by engineers and scientists.

EXAMPLES AND PROGRAMS

• Examples• Hotel – reduce breakages of plates• Hotel – customer survey of what was important to them• Hotel – how to get an increase in bookings• Oil company - optimising the use of lubricants in drilling• Oil company – reducing noise in a telescopic handler• Airline company – are planes fully loaded, what are flight delays• Design of a machine part• Automobile company – optimal sheet metal forming process

• Programs• JMP (SAS) – healthcare to do Six Sigma• Stat-Ease – Design Expert (to do DoE)

SOME EXAMPLES

• SPC• DoE

SPC - AN EXAMPLE FROM TELECOMMS

• Apprentice in electronics company

• Learn what various departments did• Milling, lathes, welding• Test equipment• Telephone assembly

• Latter - several assembly lines• Columns of workers (on different tasks)

• Initially – poor quality phones

• Required better quality telephones

Ford assembly line (1913).

Photo: (Author unknown) via Wikimedia Commons.

A typical assembly line of the period

DOE - AN EXAMPLE FROM TELECOMMS

• Amplifier – but anyone with electronic experience would realise it is a simple and unrealistic example

• 3 elements• Resistor (20 Ω +- 5% - i.e. 2 options, 19 Ω and 21 Ω)• Capacitor (10 μF +- 5% - i.e. 2 options)• Microstrip lines (10 μm +- 5% - i.e. 2 options)

• 23 gives 8 experiments – full factorial

• Look at amplifier output – i.e. the gain for each experiment

• Designers can turn a standard design into a robust one that gives the highest yield

OPTIONAL – PAPER HELICOPTER EXPERIMENT• The academic paper (Box, 1991)

• The design

• Scissors

• A4 paper

• Understand variation

• Ask questions about causes of variation

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

• Box and Woodall (2012)

• To be innovative you have to do experiments and make mistakes ?

• Does innovation stifle quality ?

• Approaches to innovation :• Inductive-deductive• Lateral thinking• Group discussion in an informal setting

• Thoughts about how the conference audience use these approaches

• For competitive advantage, to be market leader, gain business value

THAT WAS IT – 2 DAYS IN TURKEY

REFERENCES

• Box and Woodall (2012) Innovation, Quality Engineering, and Statistics

• Box and Lui (1999) Statistics as a Catalyst to Learning I

• Box (1999) Statistics as a Catalyst to Learning II

• Box (1991) Teaching Engineers Experimental Design with a Paper Helicopter

• Clarke & Kempson (1997) Introduction to the Design & Analysis of Experiments

• Lloyd R (2012) An Introduction to the Model for Improvement

• Lloyd R (2012) Building Skills in Data Collection & Understanding Variation

• Lloyd R (2012) Using Run Charts & Control Charts to Understand Variation

• W Edwards Deming (1989) Out of the Crisis