Statistical Methods for Quality Improvement, Third Edition

Preface to the First Edition

A moderate number of books have been written on the subject of statistical quality control, which in recent years has also been referred to as statistical process control (SPC). These range from books that contain only the basic control charts to books that also contain material on acceptance sampling and selected statistical methods such as regression and analysis of variance.

Statistical Methods for Quality Improvement was written in recognition of the fact that quality improvement requires the use of more than just control charts. In particular, it would be difficult to keep a particular process characteristic “in control” without some knowledge of the factors affecting that characteristic. Consequently, Chapters 13–16 were written to provide insight into statistically designed experiments and related topics.

The first two chapters provide an overview of the use of statistics in quality improvement in the United States and Japan. Chapter 3 presents statistical distributions that are needed for the rest of the book, and also reviews basic concepts in probability and statistics. Basic control chart principles are discussed in Chapter 4, and Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9 contain the material on the various control charts. This material has several unique features. In particular, there is some emphasis on cumulative sum (CUSUM) procedures, and an entire chapter (Chapter 9) is devoted to multivariate charts. Chapter 7 discusses the commonly used process capability ...