The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) by AdvanceHE recognises excellence in the provision of teaching within UK higher education. Each year since 2000, 55 individuals have been selected to receive this national award. A common…
There comes a point when your spreadsheet models of business processes just don’t cut it. You observe some complexity that is just too difficult to explore. You have questions that remain unanswered because you can’t do…
Here is my invited talk about Cyber-Physical Systems challenges, for iSCI2020 in Guangzhou, China. It was pre-recorded due to the COVID-19 travel ban. Research Challenges for the Industrial Adoption of Cyber-Physical Systems Abstract: Interest in…
Really pressed for time? Download the full guide to creating more flexible learning materials. I’ve been part of higher education for over twenty years now, witnessing a number of changes that have each presented different…
It doesn’t take long for a conversation on the shop floor of a manufacturing plant to mention lead time. There always seems to be something or other that will affect it, usually negatively. But what…
Those that practice regular reflection, and have an operational system in place, witness some significant benefits in their development. At the very least, you will be more aware of how you behave – and while…
The Analytics component of ADVANCE helps us focus on understanding how to use measurements to their best effect. Lots of organisations produce data from their management information systems (MIS), and they spew out reports which…
In agriculture, cultivate makes us think of preparing the soil for planting and tending to crops. When we cultivate we improve something; we foster growth, perhaps by focusing on a particular situation, person or characteristic….
Leadership development texts often refer to the importance of vision – having a vision, constructing a vision and the communication of the vision. But what is vision creation, and how important is it to have…
Experienced shop floor supervisors and production managers can often find themselves at odds with the production planning function in a manufacturing business. Tensions emerge between the organisational desire to trust the principles of Materials Requirements…
While you will find a relentless justification for the need to apply science to manufacturing management in these articles, it would be rather naive to think that just looking after the mathematics will solve all…
What place is there in the factory for any talk of science? In fact, it all sounds a bit technical, too theoretical, and probably of no use in practice. Theory doesn’t take account of machine…
There are plenty of advocates of Machine Learning (ML) at the moment. Many of them have something to sell, which of course uses ML (along with Artificial Intelligence, AI). ML should be able to help…
Similar to the PERCENTILE formula, MS Excel has two functions that enable you to find the value in a range of numbers at a specific quartile. QUARTILE.EXC is used if you want to obtain the…
MS Excel has two functions that enable you to find the value in a range of numbers at a specific percentile. PERCENTILE.EXC is used if you want to obtain the percentile excluding the first and…
Quantiles are useful for talking about where a particular value lies within a dataset. Unfortunately, they are not that widely understood. We can think of quantile as equal portions of the data distribution. Once we…
It has been said before, but having clean data is one of the best ways to ensure that your analysis is based on a sound footing. In the same way that we can tell whether a…
Machine Learning (ML) is very popular at present. It’s capabilities are almost magical if you listen to the software vendors. There is no doubt that ML enables interesting capabilities. If you have ever browsed Amazon…
People are the key asset of any business organisation. For a business to be profitable we need to manage resources effectively, especially Human Resources. Human Resource Analytics can help. Years of management practice, organisational research…
A lot of people will use Microsoft Excel to do their analysis as it is installed on their desktop computer. To do basic descriptive statistics you will need to know how to calculate the mean,…