Why?
Those responsible for production, engineering, maintenance or quality spend a lot of time planning and carrying out tests. Unfortunately, those tests are not always done under the most ideal conditions. Our intuition and, unfortunately, sometimes our training incorrectly teach us that it is best to change only one parameter at a time because otherwise we don't know what we are doing. This then inevitably leads to what is called the "One-Factor-At-the-Time" approach. However, our intuition turns out not to be a good teacher when it comes to performing tests.
What?
Design of Experiments (DoE) is a methodology for obtaining maximum information about the effects and interactions of process parameters on the outputs we are interested in, using as few trials as possible. Relatively recently, the new Definitive Screening Design (DSD) tool has been added to the arsenal of Design of Experiment tools, allowing us to gather even more information with even fewer trials. In several industries (metal, pharmaceutical, textile, petrochemical), we have already successfully applied this DSD tool several times.
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Joachim Vermeeren
