Stat-Ease, Inc.

Bringing design of experiments (DOE) to England might be likened to delivering coals to Newcastle, but that's what three U of MIT alumni accomplished via their company, Stat-Ease, Inc. Last September, they displayed their new version of statistical software, called Design-Expert®, at the international Industrial Statistics in Action Conference at Newcastle University. Attendees from the United Kingdom, Europe and worldwide responded very enthusiastically. As testimonial, statisticians from SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals put up a poster saying that easy-to-use software, specifically Design-Expert, must be made available to all experimenters to foster use of DOE.

The irony of this trans-Atlantic software success is that DOE methods came to the USA from England. Sir Ronald Fisher, a distinguished British statistician, developed the basic tools while at Rothamsted Agricultural Station in the 1920's. He published the seminal "Design of Experiments" in 1935. During this period, most of the DOE work occurred (literally) in the field of agriculture. For example, in a pioneering study, researchers from University of Minnesota made use of the statistical tools developed by Fisher to evaluate different types of barley. They randomly applied the various treatments within several blocks of land at various agricultural stations around the state. After removing the block differences and accounting for natural variability in yields, they saw statistically significant advantages to growing certain types of barley. The design used for this one-variable experiment is called a randomized block.