Design for Six Sigma Crispy Crust

Just before I left work I was involved in a project that I really liked. It involved doing a lot of thoughtful preparation and then using a statistical tool to set up and analyze a series of experiments. But the best thing of all was that after taking the training and then completing your first project you were awarded a "green belt" certification. A rare dash of obscurity, borrowing martial arts promotions for an engineering skill. But since I left before completing the project, I didn't get that green belt.


Flash forward to now and I have dragged out our bread machine, an impulse purchase from the late 90's when these were all the rage. We were out of bread and I didn't feel like going to the store, and thought I would try this thing out. Well I pull out the instruction manual (I always read instruction manuals, I just do) and lo and behold I think that they have done a DFSS project to develop the bread recipe. I just know it. Look:



The manual even makes references such as "When developing these bread machine recipes, hundreds of loaves of bread were baked..." and "Usually there are several ways to improve baking results. We recommend you make adjustments one at a time and keep track to know what changes were made to create your perfect loaf."

I can exactly envision what the House of Quality and P-Diagram would look like. (Please excuse the jargon, but I got excited)


Then, in a perfect example of all things coming together, I get a comment on my Cardamom for Life posting from Danielle (who just might be part Scandinavian) suggesting that I use cardamom in making bread. So I ran a few experiments from the matrix and have come up with a honey-wheat-cardamom bread that I think is quite good.

Mmm! Fresh homemade bread. You know you want some. So now I have another one of my great ideas. Since you want bread and I want to know who is reading my blog, I am going to have a CONTEST. I was going to have it be prediction of the signal to response curve, but since I don't want to bake that many loaves of bread, I'll simplify. I will mail (or possibly deliver) a delicious fresh-out-of-the-machine loaf of Cardamom Honey Wheat bread to a lucky winner randomly chosen from whoever leaves a comment on this posting. It could be you! Your comment can say anything, such as breadmaking tips, your opinion of the blog, or whether you think I should go back to work. If you want to be anonymous (such as if you are at work) just make up a fake name (Lynn and Alisa you could resurrect your old "bar" names) and email me with your true identity in case you win.




A couple technical notes on leaving a comment: if you are not already signed in to blogger, make sure you click on the button next to anonymous before you hit the "publish" bar. Otherwise it erases what you wrote. Also, if there are posts newer than this one, you can still put a comment here. I'll pick the winner in about a week.