Quality Tools of the Trade
In the early 1980s, Carl Mentch at GE Lighting in Cleveland wrote a series of short documents describing fundamental statistical methods that he called Quality Tools of the Trade. These wonderful documents included: a short explanation of the method, data requirements and conditions for use, the procedure, one or more lighting-specific example problems, and a lighting-specific homework problem. I (Paul) was lucky to receive these documents and I even got to attend some of the popular seminars held at GE by Carl and others on these topics. GE Lighting still reproduces Carl’s original Quality Tools of the Trade for their new engineers.
The documents listed below are our own Quality Tools of the Trade. Some of the documents are on topics originally picked by Carl but there are many others that we’ve added over the years. We use these documents as appendices for our various course materials and we also let customers pick from the list to design their own custom Tools of the Trade courses. Each topic can be covered in a 1.0-1.5 hour session which includes time to work through the example problems and for discussion.
- Tukey’s Quick Test
- Boxplot Slippage Tests
- The Two Independent Sample t Test
- Runs Test for Randomness
- Fisher’s Exact Test
- McNemar’s Test
- Process Precontrol
- The Bland-Altman Method
- Gage Error Long Studies
- Gage Error Short Studies
- Design of Single Sampling Plans for Defectives
- Analysis of Means (ANOM)
- Normal Probability Plots
- Variable Transforms
- Circular Normal Distribution
- Taguchi’s Loss Function
- The Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid
- Linear Regression Lack of Fit
- Control Charts for Defectives
- Control Charts for Defects
- Control Charts for Measurement Data
- Sample Size Calculations for Zero Defects Sampling Plans
- Chebyshev’s Theorem
- Confidence Intervals for cp and cpk
- Minitab Exec Macros
- SPC Audit Checklist
- GR&R Attribute Studies
- Process Capability Evaluation of Measurement Data
- Two-Level Factorial Experiments
- Quality Culture Surveys
- Introduction to Quality Costs
- Quality Cost of Rectifying Inspection Plans
- ANSI/ASQ Z1.4 (Mil-Std-105)
- ANSI/ASQ Z1.9 (Mil-Std-414)
- Dodge-Romig Rectifying Inspection Plans
- Zero Defects Sampling Plans (Squeglia)
- Variables Sampling Plans
- Multi-vari Analysis
- Nonparametric or Distribution-Free Tolerance Limits
- Tolerance Limits for Normal Distributions
- Equivalence Tests
- Degrees of Freedom Calculations
- Sample Size Calculations for Fixed Effects ANOVA
- Post-ANOVA Multiple Comparison Methods
- Propagation of Error