IMPROVEMENT OF AN INDUSTRIAL THERMOSTAT USING DESIGNED EXPERIMENTS

An increasing number of quality control managers are using designed ex periments to assist in process improvement. This paper presents a step -by-step description of the design and execution of an experiment cond ucted by employees of the Athens, Alabama plant of Eaton Controls Divi sion to improve the performance of an industrial thermostat. The paper includes a detailed account of how experimental factors were determin ed and the logic and results of the designers' approach to defining '' good'' factor levels. In addition, the paper presents the results of t he actual experiment, problems encountered in data analysis, and analy tical techniques for handling the censored data that arose during the experiment.