Managing, Controlling, and Improving Quality

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471697915 ISBN 13: 9780471697916

Publisher: Wiley, 2010

Managing, controlling and improving quality is a critical activity in modern business organizations. Quality is directly linked to productivity, competitiveness, customer satisfaction, business growth, elimination of waste and other non-value added activities, and overall business success. Cycle time and throughput is just as important in a hospital emergency room as it is in a semiconductor factory. Defects and errors don't occur just in factories, they occur in transactional and service business such as banks, insurance companies, and hospitals. Even your local and state governments have a keen interest in improving service quality in operations such as issuing drivers licenses and motor vehicle registration. The U.S. Navy has had an intensive quality improvement program for many years.

This book presents an organized approach to quality management, control, and improvement. Quality problems usually are the outcome of uncontrolled or excessive variability in product or service characteristics that are critical to the customer and statistical tools and other analytical methods play an important role in solving these problems. However, these techniques need to be implemented within a management structure that will ensure success. We focus on both the management structure and the statistical and analytical tools. Our approach to organizing and presenting this material is based on many years of teaching, research, and professional practice across a wide range of business and industrial settings.

About the Author:

DOUGLAS C. MONTGOMERY, PhD, is Regents Professor of Industrial Engineering and Statistics at Arizona State University. Dr. Montgomery is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Society for Quality, the Royal Statistical Society, and the Institute of Industrial Engineers and has more than thirty years of academic and consulting experience. He has devoted his research to engineering statistics, specifically the design and analysis of experiments, statistical methods for process monitoring and optimization, and the analysis of time-oriented data. Dr. Montgomery is the coauthor of Generalized Linear Models: With Applications in Engineering and the Sciences, Second Edition and Introduction to Time Series Analysis and Forecasting, both published by Wiley.

Review:

“Your book Managing, Controlling, and Improving Quality worked out very well in my senior-level class in the past fall semester. Actually students really liked the book. I planned to cover a little bit of acceptance sampling plans but I didn’t have sufficient time. I did cover Chapter 9 Reliability though. It was a great mix of managing aspects of quality, tools and techniques of quality control and design of experiments, plus a little bit of reliability. Students were happy and I was also happy. We will keep using this book which is ideal for my class.”
―Dr. Byung Rae Choe, Indiana University of Pennsylvania