DAN GROVE

Teaching statistics to engineers

Many engineers in industry learn statistics, often as Six-Sigma, but decreasingly at undergraduate level and its status among academic engineers is low.  The situation will not improve unless we change what we teach and how we teach it.

We discuss pointers to the "how" from industrial courses that adopt a process-driven approach.

Dan's talk

Dan Grove has been an independent consultant in Statistical Engineering since 1989, majoring in designed experiments and statistical modelling applied to robust product design and development.  He has trained and coached numerous internal consultant/trainers, including Six-Sigma Black Belts and Master Black Belts, for Ford Motor Company, Jaguar Cars and Perkins Technology.

With Tim Davis of Ford, he wrote the book Engineering, Quality And Experimental Design (Longman, 1992) which was a pioneering attempt to present statistical methods within an engineering framework (rather than a statistical textbook with engineering examples).

He has developed or helped to develop a large amount of training material, including (from 1990) sections of Ford Europe's Engineering Quality Improvement Program and (from 2000) a course in Statistical Engineering (SE) for Ford's world-wide Technical Education Program.  The SE material introduces many of the statistical methods needed in robust design and Design for Six-Sigma.