Description
This book is designed to give engineers an introduction to statistics in its engineering applications, with particular emphasis on modern quality assurance. It reflects more than 30 years of teaching statistics to engineers and other scientists, both in formal courses at universities and in specialized courses at their plants, augmented by broad consulting experience. The examples in the text cover a wide range of engineering applications, including both chemical engineering and semiconductors.
My own interest in quality assurance evolved from my long-standing specialization in the design of experiments, which began with my experience as the first research statistician in the laboratories at Chevron Research Corporation, from 1957 to 1961. Since returning to academia in 1961, I have devoted much of my research to fractional factorial experiments. That aspect of the design of experiments has become the basis of off-line quality control, a key element of modern quality assurance. Given that background, you can imagine how satisfying I find American industry’s current surge of interest in quality assurance.
Almost equally satisfying is the burst of technical capabilities for the implementation of quality assurance methods by engineers at plant level-a direct result of the wide accessibility and growing power of the personal computer.
Why is it so exciting to have these capabilities available for the PC? Before the 195Os, statistical calculations were a forbidding chore. As a practical matter, we could not perform such tasks as multiple regression. Then came the mainframe, which meant that the engineer had to work through the computing section with its programmers and keypunch operators. Although the mainframes facilitated wonderful progress, using them could be intimidating and often complicated. Under some accounting procedures, it was also costly. People felt inhibited about using the company’s computers unless they had a relatively big problem and an expert to help them.
Now, after three decades of ever-accelerating progress in both hardware and software, the personal computers that most engineers have on their desks can do more easily and quickly all that the mainframes did in the late 1950s. Hcnce, most cnginecrs have little or no occasion t o deal with the mainframe that niay be miles away from their plants. All of the computations that I have made in writing this book have been carried out on such a PC, using Minitab for calculations and Statgraphics for figures, in addition, of course, to a word processor for composition.