ABSTRACT
Most technical professionals express a mixture of fear, frustration, and annoyance when confronted with statistics. It’s hard even to pronounce the word, and many people, particularly after enduring the typical college lecture on the subject, prefer to call it "sadistics". Statistics, however, are not evil. They are really very useful, especially for design of experiments (DOE). The chapter presents basic statistics in a way that highlights the advantages of using them. Statistics are very helpful in cases like this; not only as a tool for summarizing, but also for calculating the risks of readers' decision. Statistical process control offers more sophisticated tools for assessing the natural variability of a system. However, to make systematic improvements—rather than just eliminating special causes—readers must apply DOE. A much more effective statistic for measuring location is the mean, which most people refer to as the average.
