Basic Tools and Principles of Process Control

Competitive pressures are forcing many management teams to focus on process control and process improvement, as an alternative to screening and inspection. This chapter discusses techniques used effectively in industrial organizations that have adopted such ideas as concepts. Classical control charts, quality control, and quality planning tools are presented along with modern statistical process control procedures including new statistical techniques for constructing confidence intervals of process capability indices and analyzing Pareto charts. Throughout the chapter, a software piston simulator is used to demonstrate how control charts are set up and used in real-life applications.