Monthly Archives: September 2008

Since the middle of September, when more big banks began to implode, others gobbled up the remains, and the Fed began issuing band-aid loans to help make this happen, I’ve been wondering what risk analysis tools the bankers and government are using.   If there was ever an historical moment when decision making under uncertainty was […]

Last year, in anticipation of the release of @RISK 5.0 (which as you know included many six sigma capability metrics) we created an Six Sigma Forum so that there would be a place for the Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma practitioners to post questions or ideas for others to respond to.  Now that more […]

Now that Hurricane Gustav has blown out of the picture, it’s time to catch up with Henry Yennie, of the Louisiana State Department of Mental Health.  I reported earlier on Henry’s decision evaluation study of evacuation plans for the City of New Orleans.  The questions he was trying to answer with Palisade Corporation’s Monte Carlo […]

Recently, Franco Anzani of SixSigmaIn Team and Marco Manara of Casappa S.p.A. worked together on a Six Sigma tolerance analysis project where they used Palisade Corporation’s @RISK 5.0. The model represents a tolerance analysis study performed to solve a potential assembly issue in a gear pump typically used in forklifts and low noise emission machines. The […]

The Director of the European Offices of the International Monetary Fund, Saleh M. Nsouli, recently gave an address that examined some of the lessons that can be learned from the crisis in today’s world financial market. In both the private and public sectors, Nsouli advises taking a harder look at the risk management sector. For […]

Real options are the flexibilities that are inherent in general business or other decision situations. In general, a real option is present in any decision situation involving a decision-chance-decision sequence; the possibility to (at the second decision) select from a range of different decision possibilities after the occurrence of the chance event may alter the […]

At the annual rendezvous of reinsurers in Monte Carlo earlier this month, risk assessment and, in particular, risk analysis were hot topics.  Reinsurers buy up risk assumed by other insurers, and they have met in Monte Carlo every fall since 1957.  Understandably this industry has been hard hit by the upheaval in the financial markets, […]

The risk analysis model below examines the familiar production forecasting model for oil and gas wells, the exponential decline curve. The standard equation, q = qie-at (3.3), can be used with random variables for both qi (the initial production rate, sometimes called IP) and a (the constant decline rate). Here the model has an additional […]

When building a Monte Carlo simulation model in @RISK for project risk analysis, we can incorporate a risk register through risk factors. Risk factors are more concrete abstractions of risk and define situations that can be individually assessed with a limited amount of information. Risk factors affect a project through the occurrence of events that […]

On Thursday of last week, I attended a free webinar, Minitab Methods to Deal with “Bad” Data, which was given by Master Black Belt Rick Haynes of Smarter Solutions.  This is a topic that typically isn’t addressed in most Six Sigma Black Belt courses, but is extremely important for most six sigma practitioners to know […]