Managing And Improving Quality [Paperback]

This book provides an overview of the field of quality, the importance of quality in todays competitive global economy, and one of the major tools used to manage and improve quality of products and services statistical process control. In this book we explore quality programs used in industry today but focus on statistical process control. We discuss one of the major quality and process improvement tools known as control charts. Computerized application and implementation of various control charts is one of the major focuses of this text. This book provides a comprehensive coverage of quality. We first explore what is quality before discussing various statistical tools and methods that are used to monitor and improve the quality of products and services. We explain the term quality from the perspective of a manufacturer, a design engineer, a service provider and the end user of product or service the customer. Quality has been defined from several perspectives. For example, quality may have a different meaning to the engineer who designs the product, or to the manufacturer involved in the production of a product. Although we define quality from many different perspectives, the final judge of the product or service quality is the customer and therefore, quality is the customers perception of the degree to which the product or service meets his or her expectations.