Process improvement exercises for the chemical industry

Abstract Hands-on exercises have proven themselves to be excellent vehicles for communicating and reinforcing the concepts taught in process improvement, introductory statistics, and design of experiments courses. This is especially true as related to the planning aspects of data collection and designed experiments. In this article, some hands-on process improvement exercises developed and used by Rohm and Haas statisticians in industrial short courses are reviewed. All exercises can be conducted using readily available materials with times ranging from 20 minutes to four hours.