Statistical Quality Control in a Service Environment

• Activity Number: 169
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Quality and Productivity Section
• Author(s): Fugee Tsung*+
• Companies: The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
• Keywords: Quality Engineering ; SPC

Abstract

Driven by a new business environment including globalized economy, business automation, and business and technology innovations, the service sector keeps growing and now accounts for more than 50 percent of the labor force in the developed economies. It reaches as high as 80 percent in the United States and the United Kingdom. With the shift in economic focus from manufacturing to service, industrial and academic research facilities may need to apply more scientific rigor to the practices of service, such as discovering better methods to use statistics and mathematical optimization to increase quality, productivity, and efficiency to meet the challenges. This talk will focus on the development of statistical quality techniques, and discuss several technical challenges and recent extensions to the service engineering research area.