Professor Chris Nachtsheim, Frank A. Donaldson Chair of Operations Management and chair Operations and Management Science Department, and co-author Brad Jones (SAS Institute), are the recipients of the 2010 Lloyd S. Nelson Award for their paper "Split-Plot Designs: What?, Why? and How?" published in the Journal of Quality Technology (Vol. 41, No. 4, October 2009). The award, given by the journal, recognized the paper as having the "greatest immediate impact to practitioners."
Nachtsheim and Jones were also awarded the American Society for Quality's (ASQ) 2010 Brumbaugh Award for the paper. This award is presented to the author of a paper in an ASQ journal that made the largest single contribution to the development of industrial application of quality control.
Their paper summarizes the current state of the design and analysis of split-plot experiments and shows that split-plot designs are often superior to randomized designs in terms of cost, efficiency, and validity. The authors note that the treatment of split-plotting in textbooks and industrial seminars on experiment design is completely inadequate and argue that split-plot designs should be intentionally implemented much more often than is now being done.
