I have been employed by Minitab for the last ten years. For eight of these I have been running Minitab courses as a trainer. During this time I have had contact with many users of Minitab either attending courses or calling for support. These users come from many different industries and bring with them varying degrees of knowledge of statistics. Their motivation for using Minitab and statistics has frequently been initiated by topics such as Lean or Six Sigma. Lean and Six Sigma are similar concepts; a company would use a Lean program to reduce waste whereas Six Sigma promotes the use of efficiency and waste-reduction by using cost or money as a measure of success. Typically a Six Sigma program is based more on statistical techniques than a Lean initiative. Six Sigma adopted a martial arts style of classifying a practitioner’s ability or knowledge of the subject; references to Green or Black Belts in this article will be to Six Sigma practitioners. Because of the different backgrounds of our trainees our statistics and Minitab training has to cater for participants with a wide range of knowledge and experience. What I will present here are a selection of the misconceptions that I and other trainers at Minitab have encountered and our approaches to clarifying some of these.
