Way of the Quality Warrior

Since I was a child, I have been drawn to design and system optimization. Of course, I didn't have language to express that when I was a child. I loved airplanes so I read books and built models and imagined how I would design them and the design choices and tradeoffs I might make.

When I went to college, I earned bachelors degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Metallurgical Engineering aspiring to work in the aerospace industry. However, I got a co-op job with the Saginaw Division of General Motors Corporation. I was exposed to manufacturing, competitive analysis, vehicle testing, product design, and advanced development in an environment that gave students real engineering practice. And I discovered how competitive and advanced the industry was. I loved it.

I went to grad school to earn my Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering with the idea that I would continue on to earn a PhD and become a college professor. I very quickly realized that academia was not for me. Academia is competitive, but not in a way that appealed to me. I wanted to be in the cleansing fire of a competitive marketplace where people vote with their pocketbooks.

Graduate school actually was my first experience with continuous improvement tools. My thesis advisor was an empiricist and proposed studying a lot of factors in ceramics processing. Using traditional one factor at a time practices, it would take several years to complete the research and graduate.

I had heard of Design of Experiments and proposed that to my advisor. He wasn't familiar with it, … Read More