The Future of Quality Control

Industrial Quality Control vol. 2 issue 6 - May 1946

Abstract:In 1946 the author, director of quality assurance for Bell Telephone Laboratories, sought to identify some future trends in quality. The article includes discussion of the relative merits, costs and benefits of different sampling techniques and how they might be applied in the future. He recommends inserting quality control procedures early in a process, so the costs of poor quality can be minimized. He predicts what successful quality control professionals will need to know, and that the importance of quality control will grow. He weighs the relative merits of several different scenarios for inserting quality control into the organzational chart of a company, and predicts that companies which cannot maintain assured quality will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the future.

Keywords: Statistical process control (SPC) - Sampling