QUALITY ENGINEERING

At the end of the course the students should be able:

• to know the main quality principles and definitions;
• to collaborate a quality assurance team implementing the ISO 9000 standards;
• to implement a process improvement project according to DMAIC metholodogy and Six Sigma principles;
• to perform a preliminary data analysis aimed at identifying quality issues in manufacturing/service processes;
• to implement statistical process monitoring tools to check process stability;
• to perform process and measurement system capability analysis;

to use the commercial software Minitab® quality tools

Learning is based on theory classes and practice sessions. Practice sessions are scheduled once per week and consist of solving numerical problems/case studies.

This course introduces students to quality management philosophies commonly used either in industry and service companies to monitor processes and their performance. Particular emphasis is given to statistical techniques for monitoring process stability and achieving continuous improvement.

Some selected exercises are solved by using Minitab

It is required to have good knowledge about i) the manufacturing systems classification and their performance metrics; ii) basic principles about the probability theory; iii) continuous (normal, exponential) and discrete (poisson) distributions.

1. D.C. Montgomery, “Statistical Quality Control”, 6^th edn or successive, Wiley. MAIN TEXT. The most widely used textbook about SQC in Universities teaching courses on Quality Engineering and in Companies implementing SQC tools.

2. C. Cochran, “ISO 9001: 2015 in plain English”, 2015, Paton Professional, ISBN: 978-1-932828-72-6. A recent guide to the implementation of the new ISO 9000: 2015.

3. K. Magnusson, D. Kroslid, B. Bergman, 2003, “Six Sigma: The Pragmatic Approach, Studentilitteratur, Sweden, ISBN: 9-789-144-028033. A professional text presenting the Six Sigma approach.

4. Q. Brook, “Lean Six Sigma & Minitab”, 4^th edn., 2014, OPEX Resources Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-0954681388. A very good text for professional use of Minitab in a lean Six Sigma context.