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This is an alphabetical list of articles pertaining specifically to quality engineering. For a broad overview of engineering, please see List of engineering topics. For biographies please see List of engineers.
| | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (June 2024) |
| | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (June 2024) |
A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction. It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information, and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continual improvement cycle. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality are increasingly tied to these factors. Of QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the ISO 19011 audit regime applies to both and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration.
William Edwards Deming was an American business theorist, composer, economist, industrial engineer, management consultant, statistician, and writer. Educated initially as an electrical engineer and later specializing in mathematical physics, he helped develop the sampling techniques still used by the United States Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He is also known as the father of the quality movement and was hugely influential in post-WWII Japan, credited with revolutionizing Japan's industry and making it one of the most dominant economies in the world. He is best known for his theories of management.
Total quality management (TQM) is an organization-wide effort to "install and make a permanent climate where employees continuously improve their ability to provide on-demand products and services that customers will find of particular value." Total emphasizes that departments in addition to production are obligated to improve their operations; management emphasizes that executives are obligated to actively manage quality through funding, training, staffing, and goal setting. While there is no widely agreed-upon approach, TQM efforts typically draw heavily on the previously developed tools and techniques of quality control. TQM enjoyed widespread attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s before being overshadowed by ISO 9000, Lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma.
The ISO 9000 family is a set of five quality management systems (QMS) standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) which help organizations ensure that they meet customer and other stakeholder needs within the statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service. The ISO refers to the set of standards as a "family", bringing together the standard for quality management systems and a set of "supporting standards", and their presentation as a family facilitates their integrated application within an organisation. ISO 9000 deals with the fundamentals and vocabulary of QMS, including the seven quality management principles that underlie the family of standards. ISO 9001 deals with the requirements that organizations wishing to meet the standard must fulfill. ISO/TS 9002 offers guidelines for the application of ISO 9001. ISO 9004 gives guidance on achieving sustained organizational success.
Kaoru Ishikawa was a Japanese organizational theorist and a professor in the engineering faculty at the University of Tokyo who was noted for his quality management innovations. He is considered a key figure in the development of quality initiatives in Japan, particularly the quality circle. He is best known outside Japan for the Ishikawa or cause and effect diagram, often used in the analysis of industrial processes.
Process-based management is a management approach that views a business as a collection of processes, managed to achieve a desired result. Processes are managed and improved by the organisation for the purpose of achieving its vision, mission and core values. A clear correlation between processes and vision supports the company in planning strategies, structuring business and using sufficient resources to achieve long-term success.
In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions:
Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control, and quality improvement. Quality management is focused both on product and service quality and the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Quality control is also part of quality management. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it, determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Quality can be defined as how well the product performs its intended function.
Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.
Target costing is an approach to determine a product's life-cycle cost which should be sufficient to develop specified functionality and quality, while ensuring its desired profit. It involves setting a target cost by subtracting a desired profit margin from a competitive market price. A target cost is the maximum amount of cost that can be incurred on a product, however, the firm can still earn the required profit margin from that product at a particular selling price. Target costing decomposes the target cost from product level to component level. Through this decomposition, target costing spreads the competitive pressure faced by the company to product's designers and suppliers. Target costing consists of cost planning in the design phase of production as well as cost control throughout the resulting product life cycle. The cardinal rule of target costing is to never exceed the target cost. However, the focus of target costing is not to minimize costs, but to achieve a desired level of cost reduction determined by the target costing process.
Operations management is concerned with designing and controlling the production of goods and services, ensuring that businesses are efficient in using resources to meet customer requirements.
Quality, cost, delivery (QCD), sometimes expanded to quality, cost, delivery, morale, safety (QCDMS), is a management approach originally developed by the British automotive industry. QCD assess different components of the production process and provides feedback in the form of facts and figures that help managers make logical decisions. By using the gathered data, it is easier for organizations to prioritize their future goals. QCD helps break down processes to organize and prioritize efforts before they grow overwhelming.
This is an alphabetical list of articles pertaining specifically to mechanical engineering. For a broad overview of engineering, please see List of engineering topics. For biographies please see List of engineers.
Certified Quality Engineer, often abbreviated CQE, is a certification given by the American Society for Quality (ASQ). These engineers are professionally educated in quality engineering and quality control.
A quality storyboard is a visual tool used in production and product development to outline the quality and performance standards for a project or product, ensuring that the final product meets or exceeds the specified objectives.
Joseph Moses Juran was a Romanian-born American engineer, management consultant and author. He was an advocate for quality and quality management and wrote several books on the topics. He was the brother of Academy Award winner Nathan Juran.
In business, engineering, and manufacturing, quality – or high quality – has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something ; it is also defined as being suitable for the intended purpose while satisfying customer expectations. Quality is a perceptual, conditional, and somewhat subjective attribute and may be understood differently by different people. Consumers may focus on the specification quality of a product/service, or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace. Producers might measure the conformance quality, or degree to which the product/service was produced correctly. Support personnel may measure quality in the degree that a product is reliable, maintainable, or sustainable. In such ways, the subjectivity of quality is rendered objective via operational definitions and measured with metrics such as proxy measures.
A glossary of terms relating to project management and consulting.
Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information and equipment. Industrial engineering is central to manufacturing operations.
Total productive maintenance (TPM) started as a method of physical asset management, focused on maintaining and improving manufacturing machinery in order to reduce the operating cost to an organization. After the PM award was created and awarded to Nippon Denso in 1971, the JIPM, expanded it to include 8 activities of TPM that required participation from all areas of manufacturing and non-manufacturing in the concepts of lean manufacturing. TPM is designed to disseminate the responsibility for maintenance and machine performance, improving employee engagement and teamwork within management, engineering, maintenance, and operations.