Steps and strategies in process improvement

It has been recognized that it is profitable to apply statistical methods i n quality improvement projects. The statistical methods that have been deve loped for that purpose in the 20th century have been made operational in th e form of improvement strategies. In the literature various examples of suc h strategies are described. Although often presented as a uniform approach for problem solving, they are partly differing in terms of the steps and th e tools they use. This paper's objective is to place the available strategi es in relation to each other and to study the differences in functionality. We discuss both global differences-differences relating to the functional objectives of the strategies-and detailed differences, that is, differences that concern the steps and the tools that are exploited to arrive at the o bjectives. The strategies that are taken along in the collation appear to h ave sufficient similarities to place them in a functional framework. This f ramework enables one to exploit the complementary functionalities within th e strategies and to use it as a generic strategy for statistically based pr ocess improvement. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.