Total Quality Management (TQM) addresses organizational quality from managerial and philosophical viewpoints. It focuses on customer-driven quality standards, managerial leadership, continuous improvement, quality built into product and process design, quality identified problems at the source, and quality made everyone's responsibility. Statistical quality control (SQC) is the term used to describe the set of statistical tools used by quality professionals. Statistical quality control can be divided into three broad categories:
1. Descriptive Statistics are used to describe quality characteristics and relationships. For example, mean and standard deviation.
2. Statistical process control (SPC) involves inspecting a random sample of the output from a process and deciding whether the process is producing products with characteristics that fall within a predetermined range.
3. Acceptance sampling is the process of randomly inspecting a sample of goods and deciding whether to accept the entire lot based on the results. Acceptance sampling determines whether a batch of goods should be accepted or rejected. Imagine yourself working in a manufacturing facility that produces consumer electronics products like media players, tablet PCs, flat-panel televisions, etc. How could you use the concepts in this chapter to improve the quality of the products you produce?