A taxonomy of economically based quality control procedures

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Abstract
Not long ago, industrial engineers moved to acquire more insight into the area of economic considerations in quality control. Contributions in this area fell into four basic categories: procedures for the economic selection of a quality level, procedures for the design of optimal sampling plans, procedures for the design of a sequence of sampling plans and procedures for process control. Since a satisfying literature review of this area cannot be found, this presentation is concerned with a taxonomy and descriptions of currently existing economically based quality assurance procedures. Major existing procedures are mentioned and current and future procedures are described in detail. The choice of the procedures for detailed examination is made both on the basis of the availability of information and with an aim to obtain an adequate coverage of approaches. The evaluation is in terms of: (a) Data requirement—how many different factors have to be measured and evaluated? What is the degree of difficulty of measuring and evaluating these factors? (b) Built-in assumptions—what stated and unstated assumptions are built into the procedures? (c) Usefulness of outputs—is the procedure directly applied within a context of production process by those in charge of the quality control function? (d) Versatility —can the model be used in different contexts or is it limited to one specific use? Among other things, the taxonomy analyses: data requirements, manual or computer programmes necessary to execute the calculation of different parameters, difficulty in updating, operator proficiency level, the costs that are taken into account and the possibility of using the procedure in the context of assemblies.