Quality assurance (QA) is the term used in both manufacturing and service industries to describe the systematic efforts taken to assure that the product(s) delivered to customer(s) meet with the contractual and other agreed upon performance, design, reliability, and maintainability expectations of that customer. The core purpose of Quality Assurance is to prevent mistakes and defects in the development and production of both manufactured products, such as automobiles and shoes, and delivered services, such as automotive repair and athletic shoe design. Assuring quality and therefore avoiding problems and delays when delivering products or services to customers is what ISO 9000 defines as that "part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled". This defect prevention aspect of quality assurance differs from the defect detection aspect of quality control and has been referred to as a shift left since it focuses on quality efforts earlier in product development and production and on avoiding defects in the first place rather than correcting them after the fact.
Kaoru Ishikawa was a Japanese organizational theorist and a professor in the engineering faculty at the University of Tokyo 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.
The American Society for Quality (ASQ), formerly the American Society for Quality Control (ASQC), is a society of quality professionals, with nearly 800,000 members.
The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) is an independent organization that plays a role in promoting and furthering the application of information science in modern society, particularly in the fields of healthcare, bioscience and medicine. It was established in 1967 as a technical committee of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). It became an independent organization in 1987 and was established under Swiss law in 1989.
George Edward Pelham Box was a British statistician, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. He has been called "one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century".
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.
Dorian Shainin was an American quality consultant, aeronautics engineer, author, and college professor most notable for his contributions in the fields of industrial problem solving, product reliability, and quality engineering, particularly the creation and development of the "Red X" concept.
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.
The Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP) is a small academic organization of research psychologists who have interests in multivariate statistical models for advancing psychological knowledge. It publishes a journal, Multivariate Behavioral Research.
The Design Society is an international non-governmental, non-profit organisation with a focus on engineering design. The Design Society is a charitable body, registered in Scotland under the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, number SC 031694. The Design Society's flagship event is the biennial International Conference in Engineering Design (ICED).
Chien-Fu Jeff Wu is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on the convergence of the EM algorithm, resampling methods such as the bootstrap and jackknife, and industrial statistics, including design of experiments, and robust parameter design.
The George Box Medal is an insignia of an award named after the statistician George Box. It is awarded annually by the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS) in recognition of outstanding work in the development and the application of statistical methods in European business and industry.
The Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), formerly the Institute of Industrial Engineers, is a professional society dedicated solely to the support of the industrial engineering profession and individuals involved with improving quality and productivity.
Connie M. Borror was an American statistician and industrial engineer interested in quality control and forensic toxicology. She was named the winner of the Shewhart Medal of the American Society for Quality shortly before her death, for "outstanding technical leadership in the field of modern quality control, especially through the development to its theory, principles, and techniques", and became the first woman to win the medal.
Eugene Lodewick Grant, was an American civil engineer and educator. He graduated with a BS from the University of Wisconsin in 1917. He started teaching in 1920 at Montana State University and then in 1930 at the School of Engineering, Stanford University where he taught until 1962. He is known for his work in Engineering Economics with his textbook first published in 1930. Grant was the intellectual heir of work performed by John Charles Lounsbury Fish who published Engineering Economics: First Principles in 1923, providing the critical bridge between Grant and the pioneering effort of Arthur M. Wellington in his engineering economics work of the 1870s.
Harriet Black Nembhard is Dean of the University of Iowa College of Engineering and The Roy J. Carver Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She began her role as Dean on July 1, 2020. Beginning July 1, 2023, she will become the President of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.
Thomas Pyzdek is an American author and management consultant. He is best known for being an advocate of operational excellence and is an author of several books, hundreds of articles and papers on those topics.
Jianjun "Jan" Shi is a Chinese-born American engineer and the Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He also works at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 for the "development of data fusion-based quality methods and their implementation in multistage manufacturing systems".
Christine Michaela Anderson-Cook is a U.S. and Canadian statistician known for her work on the design of experiments, response surface methodology, reliability analysis in quality engineering, multiple objective optimization and decision-making, and the applications of statistics in nuclear forensics. She has published over 200 research articles in statistical, engineering and interdisciplinary journals. She also written on misunderstandings caused by "hidden jargon": technical terms in statistics that are difficult to distinguish from colloquial English.
The IMS/ASA Spring Research Conference (SRC) is an annual conference sponsored by the American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The goal of the SRC is to promote cross-disciplinary statistical research in engineering, science and technology. The topics broadly cover a wide range of research areas including design and analysis of experiments, uncertainty quantification, computer experiment, machine learning, quality control, reliability modeling, and statistical computing, with the applications in business, industry, environment, information technology and advanced manufacturing. The SRC also regularly has invited sessions organized by editors of the top journals including Technometrics, Journal of Quality Technology, and SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification. The SRC has the tradition to support students and postdocs with scholarships to selected participants who present contributed talks or posters at the conference.
