Engineering for quality. A corporate strategy for the 21st century

Summary form only given. This two-hour introduction to quality engineering (robust design) was developed for managers and engineers with little or no training in probability and statistics. The presentation begins with an economic argument for superior product quality. The listeners are then shown what product quality really means. The sources of product performance variability are clearly illustrated as are the effects of inferior product quality on market share. During the demonstration, listeners gain a clear understanding of "quality of conformance" and its strategic role in the marketplace. The demonstration is further reinforced by a brief discussion of a popular case history. The next segment of the presentation discusses how engineers can achieve quality of conformance, by exploiting non linearities and interactions before resorting to tight tolerances. Listeners are then introduced to two useful design of experiments (DOE) tools for quality engineering, factorial experiments and response surface methods. Finally, three examples where the DOE tools are used at the earliest possible phase of the product development cycle are presented. Listeners will see how the significant power of DOE can be exploited to its fullest when experiments are performed with computer models of products, long before there exists any prototypes for physical experimentation.