Minitab – Qsutra

What are the Quality Tools Available in Minitab?

Umesh — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 12:06:49 +0000

The term Quality generally defined as “fitness for intended use”. It plays an important role in organisational excellence. Improving quality has become a top priority in an organisation, whether in discrete, process manufacturing or service industry – achieving customer satisfaction is the highest level of quality. So, we should apply techniques which can help to gain detailed insights into customer requirements and ability to provide services or products to meet or exceed their expectations.

Minitab offers several quality tools to help you explore and detect quality problems and improve your process in an objective, quantitative way. To improve quality, our common goals should include reducing defect rates, manufacturing products within specifications, standardizing delivery time and so on.

We will discuss a few of the quality tools which are available on MINITAB.

It helps us to identify process problems which are most common by plotting the frequencies and corresponding percentages of a categorical variable. We can use a Pareto chart to identify the most frequent defects, the most common causes of defects, or the most frequent causes of customer complaints. The very purpose of this chart is to highlight the most important among a set of factors which is affecting the process so that we can solemnly focus, improvement efforts on areas where the quality improvement can be made to great extent.

An inspector of a clothing manufacturer investigates sources of clothing defects to prioritize improvement in a process. So, he creates a Pareto chart to tracks the number and type of defects in the process.

It helps us to brainstorm potential causes of a problem and visualize relationships between a problem and potential causes. Sometimes we know there is a variation in a process but we don’t know what the root cause of it. So, for this very purpose, we can create a Fishbone diagram and compare the correlative importance of different causes. This diagram can be used in any type of industry whether it can be manufacturing, service, medical research and so on. We can also customize the categories of causes according to our requirements.

In a manufacturing plant, a quality inspector wants to find out the causes behind the surface flaws of a product. It resulted in the rejection of products. He creates a fishbone diagram to know the possible causes and to implement the corrective action for it.

It helps us to understand whether our process is capable or not of meeting required specifications and provides insights into how we can improve a poor process. To perform the process capability analysis, we must mention specification limits (lower, upper or both) and compare the spread of the process variation to the range of the specification limits. When a process is capable, the process spread lies within the specification spread. It also indicates whether the process is on target or not.

In a piston manufacturing industry, quality engineers want to assess the process capability. They collect 25 subgroups of five piston rings and measure the diameters. The specification limits for piston ring diameter are 74.0 mm ± 0.05 mm.

All the measurements are within the specification limits. The process is on target and the measurements are approximately centred between the specification limits.

MSA helps us to find variation due to measurement system itself and guide us to evaluate the consistency and accuracy of operators. A Measurement System Analysis is a critical component for any quality improvement process. So, it is always the first priority to evaluate measurement system before using control charts, capability analysis, design of experiment, or other analyses, to prove that the measurement system of the process is accurate and precise. And hence we can clarify that the data are reliable for making a decision.

In the manufacturing industry, an engineer selects 10 parts that represent the expected range of the process variation. Three operators measure the 10 parts, three times per part, in random order. By using MINITAB, he performs a crossed gage R&R study to assess the variability in measurements that may be from the measurement system.

It helps us to evaluate the quality of incoming or outgoing products, based on certain quality characteristics. Acceptance Sampling is an alternative to 100% inspection and is a major component of the quality control process. Here, inspection is performed on a lot or batch of parts or products. We can use acceptance sampling to accept or reject a lot based on a representative sample.

There are two methods of Acceptance Sampling – Attribute and Variable Sampling Plan.

You might be thinking, which method is applicable for your process: Attribute sampling plan or Variable sampling plan?

To know more about the Acceptance Sampling, please check our blog titled “How to Decide Whether to Accept or Reject the lot in Manufacturing Scenarios?”

These are the few tools; we have discussed and to know more about the other quality tools – you may download a free trial version of Minitab.

With Recent Release, Minitab now Available on both Desktop and the Cloud.

NB – Want to learn, How to use & explore Quality Tools Available in Minitab Software? Attend our Minitab Certified Training Program, starting from basic to advanced level. Some of the Minitab software training certified courses are Minitab Essentials, Statistical Tools for Pharmaceuticals, Statistical Quality Analysis & Factorial Designs, etc. Apart from Minitab training, we also conduct basic and advanced Statistical training. Some of the Statistical training certified courses are Predictive Analytics Masterclass, Essential Statistics For Business Analytics, SPC Masterclass, DOE Masterclass, etc.

We also provide wide-ranging solutions for Enterprise Quality Management to achieve Organisational Excellence.

Why Choose Minitab as your Statistical Data Analytics Software?

Umesh — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 06:35:37 +0000

Since we are living in a data-driven society, where Data Analytics have taken centre stage in recent years. Data Analytics helps us to extract valuable information from data and support decision making strategy in an organisation. The importance of data analytics is very well known in all areas. We use data analytics to find new improvement opportunities in an organisation irrespective of industrial types. It is applicable in all the department of an organisation viz. manufacturing, sales, finance, marketing, production, supply chain, R&D and so on.

However, there are challenges ahead for organisations to recruit an employee who has –

In simpler words, there is a huge gap between the present and required analytics skills workforce. Moreover, organisations want the right analytical tools which are easy to use, better & faster, reliable and supported by technical experts. Here, Minitab comes into play which overcomes all these challenges and gives meaningful solutions to your toughest business problems.

Let’s find more about Minitab….

What is Minitab?

Minitab is a data analytics software which delivers statistical analysis, visualizations, predictive and improvement analytics to enable data-driven decision making. Regardless of statistical background and programming skills, organisations can use Minitab to analyse small and large datasets for quality improvement, process validation, product development and so forth.

Please click here to download the trial version of Minitab.

Features

Easier data preparation - Prepare your data for analysis even easier. Import your data on a click from excel, database or any text file.
Effective data visualization - Visualize your data in a simple graphical output; scatterplots, boxplots, dotplots, histograms, time series plots, etc. Understand the patterns, trends and outliers in data.
Effortless presentation - Export graphs and output directly to Word or PowerPoint. Easily create presentations and share your insights with your clients, colleagues and management.
Expert Guidance - New to data and analytics. No worries, with the help of Minitab Assistant and Quality Trainer, you can do analytics easily.

Please click here to know more about the features of Minitab.

Key Highlights

I want to highlight some of the major tools which are available in Minitab for significant processes, which helps to increase efficiency and drive organisational excellence.

Quality - For quality improvement, tools available are Measurement system analysis (MSA), Control Charts, Capability Analysis, etc.
Process Validation - For process validation in all the stages i.e. process design, process qualification and continued process validation, tools available are MSA, Hypothesis testing, Regression, Control charts, Acceptance Sampling, etc.
Product Development - For product development, tools available are Design of Experiments (DOE), Power & sample size, and tolerance intervals.
Business Analytics - For business analytics, tools available are correlation, statistical modelling & regression, CART®, time-series analytics, multivariate methods, etc.
Reliability Engineering - For reliability engineering, tools available are distribution analysis, warranty analysis, probit analysis and so forth.

Few of the organisations, I would like to mention where Minitab has been used to overcome various process challenges.

Ford Motor Company - Minitab helped Ford to identify and fix the manufacturing process of carpets to eliminate brush marks. As a result, it enhanced Ford's commitment to process excellence and quality improvement.
Boston Scientific - They used Minitab to evaluate the pouch-sealing process in order to define optimum process conditions and reduce material costs. Adopting the new process, they were able to reduce costs and save more resources.
Akron Children’s Hospital - They used Minitab to identify causes of billing defects in their billing process and to optimize the process. After implementing the new process, they were able to reduce defects to 13.3%.

Note – With Recent Release, Minitab now Available on both Desktop and the Cloud. Python Integration in Minitab. We can run Python scripts easily in Minitab and extend our analytical capabilities by collaborating with the Data Analyst, Data Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer and the Data Science Generalist.

NB – Want to learn, How to use & explore Minitab Software? Attend our Minitab Certified Training Program, starting from basic to advanced level. Some of the Minitab software training certified courses are Minitab Essentials, Statistical Tools for Pharmaceuticals, Statistical Quality Analysis & Factorial Designs, etc. Apart from Minitab training, we also conduct basic and advanced Statistical training. Some of the Statistical training certified courses are Predictive Analytics Masterclass, Essential Statistics For Business Analytics, SPC Masterclass, DOE Masterclass, etc.

We also provide a wide range of Business Analytics Solutions and Business Consulting Services for Organisations to make data-driven decisions and thus enhance their decision support systems.

How to Improve Manufacturing Quality by using Minitab?

Umesh — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 12:47:21 +0000

Quality is the common terminology which has become one of the most important customer decision factors and thus controlling and improving quality has become the topmost priority in an organisation. For an organisation to sustain in today’s competitive world, it should deliver quality consistently.

Quality can be generally defined as a “fitness for intended use”. As per the manufacturing perspective, to manufacture products based on the quality of conformance (design specifications). Manufacturing covers a wide range of areas like aviation, automobiles, pharmaceutical, electronics, food & beverages, chemical, glass and so on. As we all know that manufacturing quality is a continuous improvement process and every one of an organisation, starting from ground level to a higher level, has to contribute their knowledge & experience to achieve the highest level of quality.

Before moving to the main agenda of this blog, let’s discuss a bit about MINITAB.

What is Minitab?

Please click here to download the trial version of Minitab.

Now, we will discuss,

How can we improve our Manufacturing Quality by using Minitab?

As customer expectations have risen over time, it is a challenge for every organisation to improve customer satisfaction, keep manufacturing costs to a minimum, reduce defects and improve quality. To overcome these challenges and improve our Manufacturing Quality, we can use Minitab.

Following are some of the statistical data analytics tools available in Minitab, which helps to improve Manufacturing Quality: –

Before doing analysis, we should know the sample size required to do the analysis. If we collect more samples than required, it will waste our resources and if we collect fewer samples than our results might lack accuracy. So, to collect optimum samples required, we apply the concept of “Power & Sample Size”.

***** To Know more about the concept of “Power & Sample Size”, You can read our blog titled “Is your Sample Size enough for doing the Analysis?” *****

During data collection, how much we are sure that the data we have collected is reliable enough for doing analysis! In manufacturing scenarios, we collect measurement data from various sources and the device measuring the host should produce reliable results. Measurement system analysis (MSA) helps us to detect variation in a measurement system and are used to collect reliable data. For your kind note, it is a prerequisite for successfully implementing lean, six sigma and lean six sigma projects.

When we plot data in the form of graphs or diagrams, it gives an overall view of a process data in a simper visual form and easy to understand. Some of the popular graphical analysis tools available in Minitab are bar chart, histogram, boxplot, Pareto chart, scatterplot, control chart, etc.

ANOVA or Analysis of Variance helps us to choose the best process methods, reliable suppliers, compare different groups and so on. It is used when we have more than two independent sample groups. It compares the significant differences between the means.

***** To Know more about ANOVA, You can read our blog titled “Understand the application of ANOVA in Manufacturing Process!” *****

In the manufacturing industry, we often required information about process performance or capability. So, we can make decisions with regards to customer requirements. Process capability refers to the capability of a process to meet customer requirements consistently. It is one of the primary tools in Statistical Process Control.

In manufacturing scenarios, product design & formulation plays an important role and getting an optimum response is always a headache. Design of experiment helps us to understand the process parameters influence the settings and identify the reasons for the changes. Thus, it provides a quick medium to understand and optimize products and processes.

We have discussed a few of the statistical data analytics tools available in Minitab. Applying these tools in a proper sequence, you can achieve the highest level of quality for your manufacturing processes.

Please click here to download the trial version of Minitab.

Attend our training program to gain exposure to a broad range of statistical tools and assess it in your process for Improving Service Quality. Attend our Minitab Certified Training Program, starting from basic to advanced level. Some of the Minitab software training certified courses are Minitab Essentials, Statistical Tools for Pharmaceuticals, Statistical Quality Analysis & Factorial Designs, etc. Apart from Minitab training, we also conduct basic and advanced Statistical training. Some of the Statistical training certified courses are Predictive Analytics Masterclass, Essential Statistics For Business Analytics, SPC Masterclass, DOE Masterclass, etc.

We also provide wide-ranging solutions for Enterprise Quality Management to achieve Organisational Excellence.

How to Improve Service Quality by using Minitab?

Umesh — Thu, 07 May 2020 12:08:37 +0000

In this competitive world, Quality has become the pivotal factor which differentiates an organisation from its competitors. And most importantly one of the most important customer decision factors in the selection of various products and services. By providing good quality services, we can meet customer expectations, enhance organisational’s image, increase profitability, reduce costs, meet industry standards and so on. Thus, focusing on quality helps keep an organisation strong in all areas.

Quality can be generally defined as a “fitness for intended use”. As per the service perspective, to provide an excellent service without any interventions and to meet or exceed customer expectations. In other words, quality is a value for a performance or a service.

Service sector covers a wide range of areas like hospitality, healthcare, IT, Finance, marketing & sales, retail, e-commerce, media and so on. For an organisation to sustain in today’s competitive world, it should deliver quality consistently. As we all know that service quality is a continuous improvement process and every one of an organisation, starting from ground level to a higher level, has to contribute their knowledge & experience to achieve the highest level of quality.

Before moving to the main agenda of this blog, let’s discuss a bit about MINITAB.

What is Minitab?

Please click here to download the trial version of Minitab.

Now, we will discuss,

How can we improve our Service Quality by using Minitab?

Service Quality is crucial to the success of any service organisation. Customers will prefer those organisations which give their desired services with the highest level of service quality. Thus, service quality plays a vital role in adding value to the overall service experience.

Following are some of the statistical data analytics tools available in Minitab, which helps to improve Service Quality: –

***** To Know more about the concept of “Power & Sample Size”, You can read our blog titled “Is your Sample Size enough for doing the Analysis?” *****

During data collection, how much we are sure that the data we have collected is reliable enough for doing analysis! Why do we need reliable data? In order to make good decisions, we need reliable or quality data. Measurement system analysis (MSA) helps us to detect variation in a measurement system and are used to collect reliable data. For your kind note, it is a prerequisite for successfully implementing lean, six sigma and lean six sigma projects.

When we plot data in the form of graphs or diagrams, it gives an overall view of a process data in a simper visual form and easy to understand. Some of the popular graphical analysis tools available in Minitab 19 are bar chart, histogram, boxplot, Pareto chart, scatterplot, control chart, etc.

Suppose in the Healthcare Industry, we can use the ANOVA test to compare different medications and the effect on patients. We can compare which medication works better for treatment and hence we able to choose the best one.

Correlation is used to analyse the relationship between the factors. In other words, it measures the degree of closeness between the variables. For Sales & Marketing, it might be useful to know the relation between sales and promotions, sales and customer income, etc. In service processes, we can use correlation analysis to find the factors which have more influence on customer requirement and so on.

After finding the relationship between the factors or variables, we can use regression analysis to predict future outcomes. Suppose we want to predict the Sales of a Company based on the past data, what can we do? We can use regression analysis to predict the outcomes.

Note – With Recent Release, Minitab now Available on both Desktop and the Cloud. Python Integration in Minitab. We can run Python scripts easily in Minitab and extend our analytical capabilities by collaborating with the Data Analyst, Data Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer and the Data Science Generalist.

Please click here to download the trial version of Minitab.

We also provide wide-ranging solutions for Enterprise Quality Management to achieve Organisational Excellence.

Minitab Assistant – Easiest way to Analyse data like an Expert!

Umesh — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 13:02:29 +0000

New to Data and Analytics, no worries – You can analyse data like an Expert using Minitab Assistant. It guides you through the analysis (from beginner to advanced level) and helps you to interpret and present results.

We often see organisation face challenges in hiring an employee who has adequate knowledge of programming and statistics. Here, the Minitab Assistant can help the organisation to overcome these challenges.

Before moving to the main agenda of this post, let’s first check the information related to Minitab..

What is Minitab?

Please click here to download the trial version of Minitab.

With Recent Release, Minitab now Available on both Desktop and the Cloud.

Now, after knowing a bit about Minitab – We will continue our discussion further about Minitab Assistant.

How Minitab Assistant can help you?

It helps you to choose the appropriate tool required for your data analysis. There is a step by step guide for you. During the “Hypothesis Testing”, you’re in dilemma to choose the appropriate tool based on your samples – You can use the “Help Me Choose” option and decide which one is best for you.

If you face any challenges to understand the statistical terminology or any questions related to a particular method you’re doing, Assistant is there to guide you. With the help of detailed examples and simple explanation, you’ll able to relate with your process data and do the analysis.

By following the clear instructions, you’ll able to analyse your data in a sequential manner and monitor every phase of your analytical process.

Assistant help you to understand and interpret your results by providing a series of reports viz. summary report, diagnostic report and report card. These reports include comments, additional detail about unusual data points (outliers), normality and so on.

With the help of Minitab Assistant, you can do Measurement System Analysis (MSA), Graphical Analysis, Hypothesis Testing, Regression Analysis, Design of Experiment (DOE) and many more.

Eager to use Minitab Assistant,

Please click here to download the trial version of Minitab.

NB – Want to learn, How to use & explore Minitab Software? Attend our training program to gain exposure to a broad range of statistical tools and assess it in your process for Improving Service Quality. Attend our Minitab Certified Training Program, starting from basic to advanced level. Some of the Minitab software training certified courses are Minitab Essentials, Statistical Tools for Pharmaceuticals, Statistical Quality Analysis & Factorial Designs, etc. Apart from Minitab training, we also conduct basic and advanced Statistical training. Some of the Statistical training certified courses are Predictive Analytics Masterclass, Essential Statistics For Business Analytics, SPC Masterclass, DOE Masterclass, etc.