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.

1. PROCESS IMPROVEMENT &
DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS –
LESSONS LEARNT FROM A
EUROPEAN STATISTICS
CONFERENCE.
IAN MORTON,
SEPTEMBER 2013

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.

4. CONTENTS
• What is ENBIS & The Greenfield Challenge
• Conference
• arrangements,
• people,
• material
• programs
• So what will you do with this learning ?

5. WHAT IS ENBIS ? AND
THE 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.

6. HOTEL VERSUS CONFERENCE
From a development point of
view there is a lot of new
construction in terms of
offices, retail and housing
in Ankara, Turkey. You get the
impression of affluence.

7. CONFERENCE ARRANGEMENTS
• Delivered my talk again
• Parallel strands of talks
• Some talks technical and detailed
• Some very practical
Some statistics ------->

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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)

11. SOME EXAMPLES
• SPC
• DoE

12. SPC - AN EXAMPLE FROM TELECOMMS
A typical assembly line of the period
• 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.

13. 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

14. OPTIONAL – PAPER HELICOPTER EXPERIMENT
• The academic paper (Box, 1991)
• The design
• Scissors
• A4 paper
• Understand variation
• Ask questions about causes of variation

15. 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

16. THAT WAS IT – 2 DAYS IN TURKEY

17. 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