The role of test in total quality management

The quality of a delivered product or system is ultimately limited by the quality of its design and manufacturing process. Defects that escape the design, manufacturing, and test processes are delivered to customers. Process Potential Index (Cp) and Process Capability Index (Cpk) are now widely used to express design and manufacturing quality. Design quality may be estimated from product models, if they exist, or measured using parametric test data. The difficulty in using test data is not so much in the calculations, but in the recording, storing, and selection of the data to be used in the calculations, This paper defines the metrics of quality estimation and describes an implementation of a system for estimating defect levels and process capabilities. The implementation includes the definition of a standardized parametric data exchange language for test data and an analytical system to standardize product quality measurement.<>