Chapter 3. A First Look at JMP^®

This chapter provides you some initial familiarity with JMP, the enabling software that we use for Visual Six Sigma. Here the intention is simply to provide sufficient background to allow you to follow the use of JMP in the six case studies that appear in Part Two of the book. In Chapter 2, we explained the roles of statistics as detective, also known as exploratory data analysis (EDA), and statistics as judge, also known as confirmatory data analysis (CDA), within Visual Six Sigma. Although we emphasize the usefulness of EDA in this book, it is important to mention that JMP also has very comprehensive CDA capabilities, some of which are illustrated in our case studies.

JMP is a statistical package that was developed by the SAS Institute Inc. First appearing in October 1989, it originally was designed to take full advantage of a graphical user interface that at the time was only available through the Apple Macintosh. JMP has enjoyed continual development ever since those early days. Today JMP is available on the Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems, having a similar look and feel on each. The specifics presented in this chapter relate to the Windows version of JMP. If you are using the Mac or Linux operating systems, please refer to the appropriate manual.^[]

From the beginning, JMP was conceived as statistical software for EDA. It has a visual emphasis, and is nimble and quick owing to the fact that data tables are completely placed into local memory. This eliminates accessing and reading from the hard drive, resulting in high-speed performance, since access delays only happen when a table is initially read or finally written. It is worth noting that, although other software packages target Six Sigma analysis running in a Windows environment, many have a DOS heritage that makes it difficult or impossible to fully support dynamic visualization and the unfolding analysis style required for EDA.^[]

Of course, what makes JMP visual and nimble is best illustrated with examples. We start to give examples in the next section and invite you to follow along. We remind you that the data tables used in this book are available on the book's Web site (http://support.sas.com/visualsixsigma).