Total Quality Control [antikvár]

Product quality, always of importance, is rapidly becoming the most significant factor in customer decisions. This is true whether the pur- chaser is a housewife, a large industrial corporation, or a military pro- curement agency. The engineering and management field that is concerned with product quality has had, and is continuing to have, an almost phenomenal growth. Once the interest of a few technical men, quality control is today the primary concern of an increasingly large number of managers, engineers, and statisticians. The problems to which these men and women direct their attention exist in many forms: the assurance of a positive customer reaction to products; the development of appropriate levels of reliability in a com- pany's components and assemblies; the maintenance of the maximum con- trol of process in the factory; the performance of the right kind of job of preproduction testing; the establishment of meaningful relations be- tween vendor and purchaser; the improvement of expenditures on quality costs and the corresponding improvement in business results. Inevitably the field of quality control has rapidly matured technically and deepened organizationally in response to the wealth of industrial operating experience over the past few years. There has now emerged a systematic body of principles, practices, and technologies today identified as total quality control to distinguish it from some of the more limited, more fragmentary work of the early beginnings of the field. It is the purpose of this book to review the total field of quality control in depth. Quality control is presented as a body of technical, analytical, and managerial knowledge. It is discussed from the business point of view, with regard to the economics of cost and profit as well as to organization and management. It is considered in terms of a thorough review of the kinds of engineering activities that must be carried on. • • Yll