Radu Demetrescoux has been a manufacturing consultant for 25 years and recently authored a Lean Toolbox (in French) with actionable details on 64 tools. He has seen the French manufacturing sector losing half its factories and is working to rebuild it. This is how he explains what happened and the way forward. It includes an […] The post Rebuilding Manufacturing in France | Radu Demetrescoux appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

This is a personal guided tour of regression techniques intended for manufacturing professionals involved with quality. Starting from “historical monuments” like simple linear regression and multiple regression, it goes through “mid-century modern” developments like logistic regression. It ends with newer constructions like bootstrapping, bagging, and MARS. It is limited in scope and depth, because a […] The post Regression and Quality | Part II – Fitting Models appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

In quality, regression serves to identify substitutes for true characteristics that are hard to observe and to find the root causes of technically challenging process problems. It is a major topic in data science, but oddly, the most extensive coverage I could find in the literature on quality is in Shewhart’s first book, from 1931! Later books, including Shewhart’s second, discuss […] The post Regression and Quality | Part I – Background appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

Hectar’s Audrey Bourolleau and Francis Nappez presented their findings about greenhouse gas emissions in the industrial production of bread baguettes at the 2024 Lean Summit in France. They see a major impact in (1) farming and (2) the production of fertilizer and plant protection products. Together, these categories account for 58% of total emissions but […] The post Rankings and Bump Charts appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

Professionals working on quality don’t usually discuss what it is. Instead, they assume a shared understanding that often isn’t there. Individuals with training in different approaches generalize from different experiences and talk past each other. In meetings, these divergent views are often not aired; in the uninhibited environment of social media, on the other hand, […] The post What is Quality? appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

The SPC literature does not consider what happens when an organization successfully uses its tools. It stabilizes unstable processes so that disruption from assignable causes becomes increasingly rare. While this happens, the false alarms from the common causes remain at the same frequency, and the ratio of true to false alarms drops to a level […] The post True And False Alarms in Quality Control appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

Aubrey Clayton’s book, Bernoulli’s Fallacy, covers the same ground as Jaynes’s Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, for a broader audience. It is also an easier read, at 347 pages versus 727. In addition, the author also discusses the socio-political context of mathematical statistics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to his […] The post A Review of Bernoulli’s Fallacy appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

The statistical quality profession has a love/hate relationship with the Gaussian distribution. In SPC, it treats it like an embarrassing spouse. It uses the Gaussian distribution as the basis for all its control limits while claiming it doesn’t matter. In 2024, what role, if any, should this distribution play in the setting of action limits […] The post Process Control and Gaussians appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

Kerry Creech became President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Kentucky (TMMK) in July 2023. He had joined Toyota as a team member in powertrain quality control in Georgetown, KY in 1990. Toyota’s policy of developing people and promoting from within made this career possible. Kerry Creech got a degree in electrical and electronics engineering in […] The post Toyota’s job rotation policy appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more

Like spouses in murders, errors are always the prime suspect when measurements go awry. As soon Apollo 13 had a problem, a Mission Control engineer exclaimed, “It’s got to be the instrumentation!” It wasn’t the instrumentation. In general, however, before searching for a root cause in your process, you want to rule out the instrumentation. […] The post Measurement Errors appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog ..read more