A Retrospective on Volume 23 of Quality and Reliability Engineering International

Abstract

Through the first 23 years of its existence, Quality and Reliability Engineering International has established itself as a key journal in the field, providing valuable information on new developments on many aspects of the subject to professionals all over the world with research articles, applications, and case study papers and timely reviews of new books. The recently completed Volume 23 (2007) continues that tradition. It is appropriate to look back over that volume and identify some important themes for the volume, highlight some of the significant papers that contribute to those themes, and discuss the future—what we hope to see going forward. Six sigma was an important topic for the journal last year. The papers by Tang et al.1 and Ung et al.2 identified some potentially useful additions to the usual six sigma tool kit as it is typically practiced through the DMAIC process and showed how six sigma principles can be applied to the critical issue of port security. Six sigma, which celebrated its 20th birthday in 2007, will continue to grow as the primary framework for quality and business improvement. The journal will continue to be a forum for both research and applications of six sigma. Applications grow in fields outside traditional manufacturing, and applications in finance, marketing, health care, distribution and logistics, public service, and government operations will continue to expand. We hope to see papers on these new applications and new tools to support those applications in future issues of the journal. Statistical process control continues to be an important area of research and applications. The journal published many noteworthy papers in this area, including the work by Wu et al.3 on adaptive Cusum schemes for monitoring the mean and variance, use of cuscores by Nembhard and Changpetch4, Nembhard and Valverde-Ventura5, and Nembhard and Chen6, and the important works on monitoring profiles by Mahmoud et al.7 and Williams et al.8. Other interesting and useful papers include work on change points by Perry et al.9, control charting dependent attribute data by Shepherd et al.10, and multivariate quality control by Guh11 and Bersimis et al.12. Another major technique for process and product quality improvement, designed experiments, continued to attract important papers to the journal. These include new work on blocking in two-level factorial designs by Kulahci13, split-plots (see Liang et al.14 and Naes et al.15), and Plackett–Burman designs by Kulahci and Bisgaard16. Many industrial experiments involve both factors that are easy to change and hard to change. Consequently, complete randomization of the treatment combinations is expensive, time consuming, or (frequently) impossible. Split-plot designs were originally developed in the agricultural sciences as a solution to this problem. The last few years have seen considerable research devoted to the deployment of these designs in the industrial setting. This journal continues to lead the way in publishing innovative research on this topic. Issue number 6 was a special issue devoted to quality management, applications, and development. Two highlights of this issue were the papers by Kenett17, Godfrey and Kenett18, and Bisgaard19 on the contributions, impact, and legacy of Joseph M. Juran. Juran is one of the foremost thinkers in the filed of management, not just quality management. Managerial breakthrough, a project-oriented approach to improvement, and system-wide approach to the integrated organizational use of quality tools are only some of the ideas he pioneered. Six sigma and the DMAIC process borrow heavily from the philosophy and methods of Juran. Quality and reliability engineers are knowledge workers, in the truest sense of that phrase. They accumulate, generate, and deploy knowledge with the express objective of improving products, processes, services, and society. Journals that facilitate the generation and widespread adoption of new methods perform a valuable service to the profession and to society in general. Quality and Reliability Engineering International will continue to play that vital role.