STAT 5031
Statistical Methods for Quality Improvement

'Introduction to Statistical Quality Control', 4th edition, D. C. Montgomery, Wiley.

A diskette. A statistical calculator. Students with independent access to a Windows PC may consider getting their own copies of STATISTIX (approximately $45 at the bookstore only). STATISTIX runs ONLY on the IBM PC.

The evolutionary sequence of controls. Assignable and random variation - approaches to control of each. Types of variables - categorical and interval variables. Batch and continuous manufacturing systems. Objects of quality control in each environment. Process capability data. Batch systems:- monitoring of the quality of individual batches. Design of schemes for quality assurance. Shewhart charts for location and scale. Monitoring by attributes - continuous sampling plans. Cusum and EWMA for variables and attributes. Combined Shewhart/cusum methods. Off-line quality control by variables. Analysis of routine plant data. Multiple regression. The use of plant-scale designed experiments to carry out process capability studies. Configuring plants to run more stably - the Taguchi concepts. Evolutionary operation of plants to track optimal settings.

Spare copies of all handouts can be found in the TA office hour room.

There will be a weekly computing session held in the IBM PC Lab. Those who prefer to compute in their own time, can skip the computing part of this meeting and do the computer work in their own time. During the quarter, you can use any of the University's public computing labs freely. Printing however is not free, so if you want to print anything in the lab you will have to buy a 'printing card'.

Assessment will be on the basis of a midquarter test, weekly homeworks and the final. Both tests are open book/open notes; bring calculator and homeworks.

The final grade will be a smooth weighted median of:
Homeworks 45% of the total weight
Midterms 30% of the total weight
Final 25% of the total weight