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Managing, controlling and improving quality is a critical activityin modern business organizations. Quality is directly linked toproductivity, competitiveness, customer satisfaction, businessgrowth, elimination of waste and other non-value added activities,and overall business success. Cycle time and throughput is just asimportant in a hospital emergency room as it is in a semiconductorfactory. Defects and errors don't occur just in factories, theyoccur in transactional and service business such as banks,insurance companies, and hospitals. Even your local andstate governments have a keen interest in improving servicequality in operations such as issuing drivers licenses and motorvehicle registration. The U.S. Navy has had an intensive qualityimprovement program for many years. This book presents an organized approach to quality management,control, and improvement. Quality problems usually are theoutcome of uncontrolled or excessive variability in product orservice characteristics that are critical to the customer andstatistical tools and other analytical methods play an importantrole in solving these problems. However, these techniques need tobe implemented within a management structure that will ensuresuccess. We focus on both the management structure and thestatistical and analytical tools. Our approach to organizing andpresenting this material is based on many years of teaching,research, and professional practice across a wide range of businessand industrial settings.