More About Minitab Inc.
Company Profile
Minitab is a privately owned company headquartered in State College, Pennsylvania. We have three subsidiaries: Minitab Ltd. in Coventry, England; Minitab SARL in Paris, France, and Minitab Pty Ltd in Sydney, Australia.
Minitab also has a growing network of representatives and distributors in countries around the world, including China, Spain, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Korea.
Company History
Minitab Statistical Software was initially developed in 1972 by three members of the statistics faculty at The Pennsylvania State University. One of the original developers, Dr. Barbara F. Ryan, is Minitab's President and CEO. The other two original developers are Dr. Thomas A. Ryan, Jr., who has since returned to teaching at Penn State, and Dr. Brian L. Joiner, a leading speaker and author in the field of Total Quality Management.
Their goal in developing Minitab was to make statistics more interesting and meaningful to students. Before the mid-1970s, introductory statistics courses were typically taught using small, made-up data sets, and students spent a great amount of time doing tedious calculations on electronic calculators. Drs. Ryan, Joiner, and Ryan wanted to use computers and statistical software in their teaching, but the packages available at the time were too difficult to use in a basic statistics course.
In response, they developed Minitab, a package so easy to use that students could learn the program with less than one hour of classroom instruction. In 1976, Duxbury Press published The Minitab Student Handbook, a textbook by Drs. Ryan, Joiner, and Ryan that, for the first time, showed instructors how to integrate the use of computer software into their introductory statistics courses.
Minitab soon became the world's leading statistical software for academic instruction, a position it continues to hold today. Minitab is currently used at more than 4,000 colleges and universities worldwide. In addition, over 300 textbooks support the teaching of statistics with Minitab, and a streamlined version of the software is bundled with the statistics textbooks of almost all leading U.S. publishers. More students worldwide have learned statistics using Minitab than any other statistics software.
As graduates took positions in industry and government, they brought their knowledge of Minitab with them and found that Minitab’s quality, reliability, and ease of use were valued outside the classroom as well. Over time our revenues from commercial customers have grown to where they now constitute approximately 90 percent of our business. Over half the companies in the Fortune 500 use Minitab, including all 3 major U.S. auto manufacturers, 12 of the world's 15 largest chemical companies, 8 of the 10 largest computer companies, 10 of the 15 largest electronics companies, and 8 of the 10 largest forest products companies.
Minitab's success led its founders to form a private company, and with Penn State's support and encouragement, Minitab Inc. was founded in July 1983. The university provided office space and use of their telephone, telex, and mail service until the company built and moved into its own 9,000-square-foot office building in 1985.
In 1995, Minitab formed its first international subsidiary, Minitab Ltd., to provide sales, training, and technical support to Minitab customers in Europe. Minitab Ltd. formed a subsidiary of its own in 1998 in Paris, France. Minitab SARL serves our French-speaking customers in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and elsewhere in Europe and Africa. Minitab's third subsidiary, Minitab Pty Ltd, was formed in 2007 to serve customers in Australia and New Zealand.
In 2002, having outgrown the space available at its first building, Minitab moved into its new world headquarters. This 88,000-square-foot facility, located on 13 acres in State College, Pennsylvania, includes an energy-efficient geothermal HVAC system, a four-story atrium with skylights, and many other innovative features.
In 2002, Minitab was named the best medium-sized company to work for by The Best Places to Work in PA, a state program that honors the top employment opportunities available in Pennsylvania. Minitab has received many other awards during its 33-year history.
Core Markets
Having led the academic market for many years, in the early 1990s we made a corporate commitment to become the leading general-purpose statistical software package for the industrial statistics market. We believe we have achieved this goal and that our software offers the best combination of functionality and ease-of-use available. Minitab offers the full range of capabilities expected in a general-purpose statistics package, plus Statistical Process Control, Design of Experiments, Reliability/Survival Analysis, and Measurement Systems Analysis.
Minitab is the software used most often in Six Sigma, a comprehensive, data-driven approach to defining and solving business problems and the world’s leading quality improvement methodology. Our software provides the power, reliability, and ease of use Six Sigma requires, and is augmented by our excellent training and the best technical support in the industry.
Minitab has close working relationships with, and its software is used and recommended by, virtually all the major quality improvement training and consulting organizations.
Key Commercial Customers
Minitab is used extensively at many of the world's largest companies, including:
3M, Armstrong World Industries, AT&T, Avery Dennison, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Bombardier, British Telecom, Caterpillar, Chase Manhattan, Compaq, Crane, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Ford Motor Company, GenCorp, General Electric, General Mills, Hewlett-Packard, International Paper, ITT Automotive, LG, Lucent Technologies, Maytag, Nokia, Pilkington Libbey Owens Ford, Reckitt and Colman, Rolls Royce, Samsung, Seagate Technology, Solo Cup, Standard Products, Toshiba, Warner, and many others.