Management Articles by George E. P. Box

• Total Quality: Its Origins and Its Future   view details
  An excellent summary how the scientific method drives Total Quality.

• Quality in the Community: One City's Experience   view details
  Highlights the evolution of the Quality movement in Madison, Wisconsin and the role of the Madison Area Quality Improvement Network during the 1980's.

• Statistics for Discovery   view details
  This report explores why investigators in engineering and the physical sciences rarely use statistics. It is argued that statistics has been overly influenced by mathematical methods rather than the scientific method and consequently the subject has been greatly skewed towards testing rather than discovery.

• Detecting Malfunctions in Dynamic Systems   view details
  Computer controls are increasingly being employed in systems ranging from simple to very complex. This report explores extending these computer systems to include monitoring schemes to detect malfunctions.

• William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement   view details
  This is the text of a talk given at the Speakers' Dinner at the Sixth Annual William G. Hunter Conference on Quality in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 2, 1993. In it, George Box recalls Bill Hunter's pivotal role in the birth of the quality movement in the c

• The Scientific Context of Quality Improvement   view details
  Scientific method is a key ingredient in the new philosophy of quality and productivity improvement. This paper provides an overview. A discussion of new ideas of how to design quality into products and processes is provided and Taguchi's work is evaluated.

• Good Quality Costs Less? How Come?   view details
  It is sometimes supposed that the manufacture of high quality goods must be expensive. The reasons why this need not be so and why quality should cost less are discussed. Publication: Quality Engineering, 1990-91, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 85-90.

• Some Problems of Statistics and Everyday Life   view details
  "The wise investigator expends his effort not in one grand design... but in a series of small designs, analysing, modifying and getting new ideas as he goes."

• What Can You Find Out From 12 Experimental Runs?   view details
  Examines the possibilities of factorially designed experiments using many variables at once.

• What Can You Find Out From 8 and 16 Experimental Runs?   view details
  Includes two articles on options for designed experiments. Design of Experiments is a tools used heavily in Six Sigma programs.

• Teaching Engineers Experimental Design With a Paper Helicopter   view details
  How a helicopter (made in with a regular sheet of paper) can be used to teach principles of experimental design including - conditions for validity of experimentation, randomization, blocking, the use of factorial and fractional factorial designs...

• On Quality Practice in Japan   view details
  Raghu Kackar, Vijay Nair, Madhav Phadke, Anne Shoemaker, and C.F. Jeff Wu. For engineers the quality training is a 30 day course covering QFD, 7 basic QC tools, 7 new QC tools, introduciton to design of experiments, robust product and process design, rel

• Quality Quandaries-Six Sigma, Process Drift, Capability Indices, and Feedback Adjustment   view details
  "The Six Sigma specification makes an allowance of 1.5 standard deviations for process drift. Simple ways in which a major part of such drift can be removed are given. These employ feedback adjustment methods specifically designed for SPC applications."

• Studies in Quality Improvement: Dispersion Effects from Fractional Designs   view details
  "The expense of repeating measurements can sometimes be avoided by using unreplicated fractional factorials to identify factors that affect dispersion."

• An Explanation and Critique of Taguchi's Contributions to Quality Engineering   view details
  "This paper presents an overview of Professor Genichi Taguchi's contributions and concludes that Professor Taguchi's quality engineering ideas are of great importance. However, many of the statistical design and analysis techniques he employs are often in

• Statistics as a Catalyst to Learning by Scientific Method   view details
  Explores the implications raised when Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is considered, as was originally intended as a statistical technique for the catalysis of iterative learning.

• An Accidental Statistician   view details
  "At one point I was having trouble with a statistical problem. A very senior scientist suggested that I contact R. A. Fisher, who asked me to come and see him. The Army did not know how to send a sergeant to see a professor, so they made a railway warrant that said I was taking a horse to Cambridge. It was a beautiful day. Fisher said "let's go and sit under that tree in the orchard, I'll look up the probits and you look up the reciprocals". The specific problem was soon solved and set me thinking about estimating data transformations."

• The Art of Discovery   view details
  Quotes by George Box in the video: “The scientific method is how we increase the rate at which we find things out.” “I think the quality revolution is nothing more, or less, than the dramatic expansion of the of scientific problem solving using informed observation and directed experimentation to find out more about the process, the product and the customer.” “Tapping into resources: Every operating system generates information that can be used to improve it. Everyone has creativity. Designed experiments can greatly increase the efficiency of experimentation."

• A Useful Method For Model-Building   view details
  "The object of much experimentation is to build or discover a suitable model. This is done by an iterative procedure in which a particular model is tentatively entertained, strained in various ways over the region of applicat.ion, and its defects found. The nature of the defects interacting with the experimenter’s technical knowledge can suggest changes and remedies leading to a new model which, in turn, is tentatively entertained, and submitted to a similar straining process."

• Teaching Engineers Experimental Design with a Paper Helicopter   view details
  "How a paper 'helicopter' made in a minute or so from 8 1/2' x 11' sheet of paper can be used to teach principles of experimental design including - conditions for validity of experimentation, randomization, blocking, the use of factorial and fractional factorial designs, and the management of experimentation."

• Do Interactions Matter?   view details
  "It has recently been argued that in an industrial setting the detection and elucidation of interactions between variables is unimportant. In this report the contrary view is advanced and is illustrated with examples."

• How to Get Lucky   view details
  "Some principles for success in quality improvement projects discuss, in particular, how to encourage die discovery of useful phenomena not initially being sought. A graphical version of the analysis of variance which can help show up the unexpected is illustrated with two examples."

• Innovation, Quality Engineering, and Statistics   view details
  "We discuss the key roles of statistics and quality engineering in the innovation process in business and industry. We review approaches that can be used in order to increase the chances of innovative discoveries. Most important, we stress the necessity for the quality engineering community to strengthen and promote its role in innovation. As [Soren] Bisgaard has said, we should reframe much of what we do as systematic innovation. Adapting to the changing business and economic climate can revitalize our profession; failure to adapt threatens it."

• Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building   view details
  "All models are wrong but some are useful ... The iterative building process for scientific models can take place over short or long periods of time. ... It should be remembered that just as the Declaration of Independance promises the pursuit of happiness rather than happiness itself, so the iterative scientific model building process offers only the pursuit of the perfect model."