Statistical Process Control for the Food Industry

4An Introduction of SPC in the Food Industry: Past, Present and Future

4.1 Statistical Process Control: A Brief Overview

Understanding the meaning of Statistical Process Control (SPC) is vital in operating SPC in the food industry. There have been attempts to expand the concept of SPC, beyond the process monitoring technique.

SPC has been categorised into several types of definitions such as:

• technological innovation (Bushe 1988; Roberts, Watson, and Oliver 1989);
• process management technique (Bissell 1994);
• control algorithm (Hryniewicz 1997);
• a component of total quality management (TQM) (Barker 1990);
• one of the quality management system in the food industry (Caswell, Bredahl, and Hooker 1998).
• Wallace et al. (2012) and Davis and Ryan (2005) viewed SPC as a participatory management system – teamwork efforts, employee involvement and enable real‐time decision‐making to be made (Deming 1986; Elg, Olsson, and Dahlgaard 2008).

SPC is a powerful collection of problem‐solving tools useful in achieving process stability and improving capability through the reduction of variability

(Montgomery 2012)

The focus of SPC is for the users to understand the variation in values of quality characteristics (Woodall 2000). The primary indicator of an effective SPC application is a stable process. The process stability refers to the stability of the underlying probability distribution of a process over time, and these very often can be described as the stability of the distribution parameters ...