8 - Some useful and practical tips for making your industrial experiments successful

Abstract

Experimental design (ED) is a powerful approach to achieve increased understanding process, leading to significant improvements in product quality, decreased manufacturing costs, and potentially thousands of dollars of savings for organizations. This chapter provides some useful and practical tips to industrial engineers and managers with limited knowledge in ED for making industrial experiments successful in their own organizations. It stimulates the engineering community to start applying ED for tackling quality control problems in key processes they deal with everyday. Industrial experiments are fundamental and crucial to increase the understanding of a process and product behavior. The success of any industrial experiment depends on a number of key factors such as statistical skills, engineering skills, planning skills, communication skills, and teamwork skills. Engineers and managers of today's modem industrial world have placed an increased emphasis on achieving breakthrough improvements in product and process quality using ED. Experimental design is essentially a strategy of industrial experimentation whereby one may vary a number of factors in a process/system simultaneously to study their effect on the process/system output. It is a direct replacement of traditional one-factor-at-a-time or “hit or miss” approach to experimentation