QUALITY

TRASH
The trash on LinkedIn keeps growing. This week, there was a very brief post on the blatant nonsense of OEE. It presented no new or useful information whatsoever. However, it had hundreds of "likes". Multiplying 3 unrelated numbers together in a search for meaning, is as ridiculous as multiplying your age, by your height, by your lucky number and hoping it will lead you to good health.

MORE TRASH
Six Sigma is nonsense enough, being a ridiculous method based on the height of Harry's stack of discs. How blatant does farce need to be for people to wake up?

A Youtube video by statistician Davis Balestracci suggests that the reason for the growing trash posing as quality, is that quality departments have become a dumping ground. It would be wonderful prove him wrong and to see people opening their eyes; eradicating fads, farce and fraud; and getting back to the fundamentals of Quality.

QUALITY
It is becoming harder to wade through the junk to find useful material such as Eric A. Budd's "yellow ball" this week. Love it or hate his analogy, it is graphic and original, as well as teaching the correct path to quality.

There is so much to learn about Quality. This week, a very long discussion with Dr Wheeler about Process Behavior Chart Power Curves yielded much insight:

Me:
"However, when a point is detected outside limits, we cannot know whether it is a shift in the mean, some temporal effect, or some chaotic effect.

... because we should react immediately to the assignable cause. "

Dr Wheeler:
"An assignable cause takes the process mean on walkabout, or it takes the process dispersion on walkabout, or both. Common causes, by definition, do not do either of the above.

Changes in the mean and changes in dispersion are consequences of having a dominant, but uncontrolled, cause and effect relationship in the process inputs. A priori, I do not care who, or what, or why this dominant, uncontrolled input is present. The fact that it is present requires action.

...

[Action on assignable causes:]

If we look and do not find anything, then just wait.

If it was a false alarm it will not happen again.

If it was real, the chart will continue to nag us until we take action.

All talk about process parameters presumes the process to be predictable. While this is the case, the process mean will effectively be unchanging. Any talk about a changing process mean is implicitly talking about an unpredictable process. "

   by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)

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