I — Datum
SVEND — a quality engineering workbench and a consulting practice
Statistical process control, capability, measurement system analysis, design of experiments and value stream mapping, in a browser.
Kaizen facilitation, MDI deployment, hoshin kanri, SMED and ISO 9001 deployment, on site with manufacturers nationwide.
Svend is Danish for journeyman: a craftsman past apprenticeship, working the trade daily, but not yet a master. Read the colophon →
II — The Software
SVEND is a browser-based quality engineering workbench for the control chart, capability study, gage record, experiment, value stream map and improvement charter. It supports the work behind a line off takt, an unstable process, an untrusted gage, a long changeover or a value stream map that needs capacity and queue analysis.
The workbench contains 180 analyses and 18 free calculators, including control charts, process capability, Gage R&R, hypothesis tests, regression, reliability analysis, design of experiments, value stream mapping with discrete-event simulation and a tamper-evident audit trail. Maps connect process steps, inventory, staffing, kaizen bursts and simulation results; analytical records retain inputs, outputs and revision history.
Our own calibration certificate reads CALIBRATED: 114 of 114 checks passed against certified references, including NIST Statistical Reference Datasets, and 4 of 4 packages pass every check. One failing package fails the whole certificate. The certificate, including anything that fails →
These are eight of the 18 free calculators. They compute in the browser, need no account, and the numbers typed into them are not transmitted or stored.
III — The Practice
Eric Wolters leads the practice. We work on site with tier 2 and tier 3 manufacturers nationwide: extrusion and molding on the west coast, print and packaging in the Pacific Northwest, beauty in the Midwest, fragrance in the Northeast, and Texas. The Carolinas and north Georgia are our home region, and we travel internationally where the work requires it. We are ILSSI accredited, and SVEND is an SCMEP Technical Partnership Provider.
Our work includes no fewer than a dozen comprehensive deployments of a standardized operational excellence system and sustained MDI deployment across more than one hundred machine centers within three quarters.
| Program | What it establishes |
|---|---|
| Hoshin Head Start | Policy deployment: priorities, ownership, review cadence and the initial operating record |
| MDI deployment | Tiered meetings, measures, escalation paths and leader standard work |
| Operational Excellence System | Hoshin kanri, MDI, kaizen and the supporting elements, deployed together. The plant operates the program on completion |
| Quality Management System | The processes, records and internal discipline required for ISO readiness |
The method paper, Force Preservation: A Campaign Model for Operational Excellence, describes the operating method used to sequence improvements without exhausting the people responsible for sustaining them. We run engagements on site as defined programs, with scope, ownership and operating cadence established at the outset.
IV — Questions
How much does a typical quality tool stack cost?
Minitab licenses run approximately $1,900 per seat per year. Add a separate value stream mapping tool and a project-tracking tool and the cost per quality engineer climbs well past that, before any integration work. SVEND puts SPC, capability analysis, Gage R&R, hypothesis testing, regression, reliability, value stream mapping and improvement tracking on one bench at $95.00 per seat per year.
How do I know the statistical results are correct?
The reference values are not ours. Statistical results are calibrated against NIST Statistical Reference Datasets: 14 certified sets, values certified to 15 significant digits. Control charts and capability are cross-checked against R’s qcc package (28 of 28 checks), hypothesis tests and regression against base R (49 of 49). 149 golden cases are held in the statistics library alone, with defined tolerance bands: p-values within ±0.005, Cpk within ±0.05, correlation coefficients within ±0.02. A result that misses a certified value fails the build rather than reaching a customer. Separately, platform configuration is audited daily by an automated suite against a catalog of 38 SOC 2 controls.
Is my data private?
Yes. Your process data is never used to train models, never shared across tenants, and never accessed by SVEND personnel without explicit written authorization. Sensitive fields are encrypted at rest and all traffic is encrypted in transit. Tenants are isolated at the database level by Postgres row-level security, and accounts support multi-factor authentication. A tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trail is live over gage readings today; analytical records follow.
What is Bayesian SPC?
Bayesian SPC applies Bayesian statistical methods to process monitoring and capability analysis. Instead of producing a single point estimate for Cpk, Bayesian SPC produces a posterior distribution: a credible interval that quantifies uncertainty. This supports statements such as “there is a 95% probability that Cpk exceeds 1.33” rather than relying on a single number that may be unreliable with small samples. A Bayesian control chart incorporates prior knowledge about process behavior, which can make it more sensitive to real shifts and less prone to false alarms than a traditional Shewhart chart when process history is available. SVEND carries both approaches, and is specific about where: Bayesian capability with credible intervals and exceedance probabilities, a Bayesian Cpk trajectory, a Bayesian EWMA chart, and a dedicated Bayesian family covering t-tests, ANOVA, regression, proportions and changepoints. The remaining classical control charts — X-bar R, I-MR, the attribute charts, CUSUM — have no Bayesian counterpart and are not presented as having one.
What is a vandrebok?
A vandrebok is the book a journeyman carried through the travelling years, stamped and signed by every master he worked under: a running attested record of what he had actually done rather than a certificate. In SVEND it is a practitioner’s book of improvement work: chartered entries promoted from a value stream map, each carrying which map and which kaizen burst produced it, the action items inside it, and who has committed to them. It is loosely two existing ideas put together: hoshin kanri’s chartered, cascaded, measured discipline, attached to the Harada method’s self-reliant owner. The difference from hoshin kanri alone is ownership: hoshin deploys strategy downward through a company, while a vandrebok belongs to a person and travels with them between employers. It also does not estimate its own value: an improvement is tied to a measurable on the map, and the map reports what happened. The vandrebok in full →
Can I cancel or decline renewal?
Yes. Seat licenses run for a year and renew annually; renewal can be turned off in account settings at any time, and the license runs to the end of the term already paid for. After that the account returns to the free tier, which keeps the workbench and your datasets at five analyses a day. Records remain. On account closure, data stays available for export for 90 days.