Palisade Featured in Quality Digest

February 14, 2006. Highlighting the growing popularity of Palisade tools in the quality control community, leading trade publication Quality Digest published an article in its February 2006 issue by Palisade's Miroslaw Janusz, Ph.D. on NeuralTools, Palisade's new Neural Networks software. "Neural Networks Software Crunches the Big Numbers" explains why neural networks are particularly well adapted to address problems in quality control and industrial processing. Offering the reader a guide tour of how the "neurons" and networks function, Dr. Janusz demonstrates the wide range of complex phenomena that NeuralTools can be used to predict-from snack food flavor to energy prices to the cost of capital.

Sophisticated Weaponry
NeuralTools is the latest arrow in Palisade’s quiver of quality control tools. @RISK and the DecisionTools Suite have proved themselves in developing Six Sigma programs and training staff in techniques to carryout those programs, as well as production floor quality. Two notable examples are Cummins’s Six Sigma program, which relies on @RISK, and Met-Mex Peñoles’s use of the DecisionTools Suite to control waste of silver and gold in its refining of precious metals. In addition, today’s quality control programs rely heavily on statistics, and Palisade’s StatTools offers companies easy ways to train employees in statistics and data analysis, and to integrate their analyses in simulation and Neural Networks predictions.

Common Denominator: Ease of Use
What do all these tools have in common that appeals to the folks in quality control? Intuitive ease of use. The quantitative techniques required for Six Sigma and other quality control programs can be daunting. But as Cummins's Ernest Lifferth points out, "We aren't necessarily interested in turning our engineers into statisticians, but we are interested in enabling engineers to use statistics-and @RISK is a great tool for this." Palisade's interfaces with the familiar Excel environment, the easy integration of information from one tool to another, and the graphic reports shorten the learning curve for new quality control initiates and make simplify communicating results.

» Read the Cummins, Inc. case study
» Read the Met-Mex Peñoles case study
» Visit Quality Digest for the full article entitled “Neural Networks Software Crunches the Big Numbers”