Tools for Problem Solving

Suppose that the boss at the store where you work on weekends asks you to pick up two dozen doughnuts on the way to work. However, you find that the doughnut shop sells by the doughnut. How many doughnuts do you need  

One of the most important things we do in life is solve problems. We confront problems constantly in school, at our jobs and in our personal lives. The more creative we are at solving these problems, the more successful we will be. It turns out that most of the problems we encounter can be attacked systematically. It is helpful to use the following steps when solving a problem  

A ratio used to convert from one unit to another 

In doing problems in this text, we will use this general strategy where it fits. It usually works best for numerical problems such as the examples in the remainder of this chapter. 

Converting Units of Measurement The doughnut problem mentioned previously is an example of something you encounter all the time converting from one unit of measurement to another. 

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The Chemical Principles Web site is at www.whfreeman.com/chemicalprinciples4e The Web-based media support for Chemical Principles offers students a range of tools for problem solving and chemical exploration, including ... 

Rather than being a scientific field on its own, polymer/additive analysis is an expertise supposed to serve as a tool for problem solving. It is necessary to make a selection. Not all of the many analytical protocols presented can become standard methods. It will be essential for the future of polymer/additive analysis that progress is made towards accepted techniques and broad use. The success of a technique requires extreme simplicity. 

One way to do this is to compute principal components models for each block and then determine the correlation between the components from each block. This method is usually called Canonical correlation.[3 From a philosophical point of view, canonical correlation is appealing since it does not assume anything about the direction of the interdependencies of the two blocks. From a practical point of view, it is, however, not very useful as a tool for problem solving. It is not certain that variables which describe a large variation in the X block are related to large variations in the Y block. It may be that only a small part of the variation in the X block is strongly related to a large and systematic variation of the responses in the Y block. 

Eubank, R.L. and Webster, J.T. The singular value decomposition as a tool for problem solving estimability problems. American Statistician 1985 39 64—66. 

Bioinformatics Field that uses sophisticated mathematical and computational tools for problem solving in diverse biological disciplines. 

The Organic Chemistry Book Companion Web site, accessed at www.whfieanan.com/oiganic7e, provides a range of tools for problem solving and chonical explorations. They include, among others ... 

We will take a general and mathematical approach in deriving the conservation laws for control volumes. Some texts adopt a different strategy and the student might benefit from seeing alternative approaches. However, once derived, the student should use the control volume conservation laws as a tool in problem solving. To do so requires a clear understanding of the terms in the equations. This chapter is intended as a reference for the application of the control volume equations, and serves as an extension of thermochemistry to open systems. 

Several factors affect a team s chemistry and success with innovation. Motivation is one factor, and there are known approaches for managing this. Level is another success factor, and it refers to (a) a person s current knowledge and/or skill and (b) a person s potential capacity for problem solving. We also have sound and established instruments (tests and IQ measurements, for example) for assessing these dimensions. Then there are resources—such as materials, money, machines, and tools—and these are typically well known. 

The Pareto chart is an established tool for problem analysis and problem solving. The 80/20 rule holds in chemical processing as well as in hard-goods operations. Using this simple tool can improve your problem-solving skills as an engineer or manager. After all, if we can become better... 

Simple tools can be used for problem solving and improvement, as outlined by Ishikawa More technical tools to control industrial design and manufacturing can be employed using Taguchi methods (Tsai has described the optimization of carbon-fiber production using the Taguchi method [49])... 

There are other acceptance tools that are listed in this chapter and which are used during the ongoing technical phase, the event phase, and the sustainment phases of the lean process. These tools are focused on maintaining stability in the process and are often used for relationship issues, for problem solving, or for adding new team members. 

Poiymer characterization using the tools of thermal analysis, analytical or process chromatography, and spectroscopy has developed primarily within the industrial analytical research and services community for problem-solving and in QA/QC operations. Diverse instruments and methods are needed to... 

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