Book Description
An introduction and explanation of pragmatic methods and techniques for reliability and risk studies, and a discussion of their uses and limitations. It features computer software that illustrates numerous examples found in the book, offering to help engineers and students solve problems. There is a module on Bayesian estimation. The computer disk is written in Visual Basic and is compatible with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. ... Read more

Book Description
The Pharmaceutical Engineering Series is a comprehensive reference for the pharmaceutical professional covering all aspects from quality, documentation and validation through manufacturing processes to facility design and management. In 'Quality', Dr Kate McCormick provides the reader with comprehensive coverage of this vital subject, including the quality life cycle, management and cost of quality, GMP, auditing and inspections. This book with the others in the series will become a unique source of reference and educational material for the readership.

Case studies and examples make the book of direct practical relevance to the professional in the pharmaceutical industry
Find the answers you are looking for quickly and easily with clear indexing and referencing
Reference to international standards and practice mean this book will be useful wherever you are working ... Read more

Book Description
"Provides previously unavailable material in sound quality crucial for a more effective design process. Presents all aspects of product sound quality, such as ""rules of thumb"" and design formulas and charts. Covers sound radiation and targeting, resolving, and testing design features." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not Worth the Money
Some interesting discussions but nothing thorough or in-depth. Buyers should note that the firm has an on-going consulting and engineering practice. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Review on Robust Design
The book is a good overview of Taguchi's methods with a few very good examples.

Excellent primer on Robust Engineering... how to book
This book is quite readable, considering the topic, and does an excellent job of explaining the high level strategies of Dr. Taguchi's approach to optimization and experimentation.It also covers tactical issues like how to determine your ideal function and noise strategies.

I've had several classes on this subject but found that the book helped clarify some of the finer aspects of the strategy and helped explain why the strategy should work.(e.g particularly the strategy for dealing with interactions).

This book would not be sufficient to teach most people Robust Engineering, but it is a great reference.

How to learn Robust Design
I like this book because it gives a very good introduction into the concepts of noise- and control-factors. It treats the concept of "energy transformation" good, which is important to find the appropriate Ideal Function for your product.

The examples are quite nice and most of them are illustrated by the p-diagram (parameter diagram). Unfortunately, examples are mainly form mechanical engineering. For me this is no drawback. Others may want to have a look on dedicated case studies from their field.

To my taste the formulas presented appear a bit uglier than they really are.

If you want to learn, how and why to use Taguchi's method, this book is an excellent tool for self-learning. ... Read more

Book Description
Sponsored by the American Society for Quality Control, this authoritative book is the first to clearly explain the ways in which the various disciplines within product quality assurance interact to achieve product integrity. It thoroughly examines the two major branches of assurance science and their relationship to design, testing, manufacturing, and application. And it offers both an in-depth treatment of principles--and a valuable overview of quality assurance management approaches and technical tools that provides professionals with a quick working knowledge, without getting bogged down in details. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Pressing the Lean Advantage
Womack and Jones in 'Lean Thinking' state that each manufacturing organization consists of: An ordering system, A production System, and a Distribution system.
Womack and Jones go on to say, as part of a Lean Action Plan:" as soon as you have flow and pull...in the production System...it is time to go to work on the... Ordering System... pipeline to spur sales and increase market share." In other words - press the advantage.
Clausing's 'Total Quality Development' is about pressing the advantage that lean transformation provides to the organization.
Clausing defines 'total quality development' as "the modern way of developing new prducts that will be competitive in the global economy" and goes on to say 'Total Quality Development' "combines the best management, strategy, and teamwork resulting in greatly reduced new product development time, a reduction in new product development costs, and increased product variety that together result in increased customer satisfaction".
Fine - you say, but what exactly is 'Total Quality Development'?
It is the integration of concurrent engineering, quality function deployment (QFD), and Taguchi's quality engineering into a total product development process.
Clausing's stated objective in writing this book is "to transform product development to achieve competitiveness in the global economy"
This book takes my breath away. If you are asking yourself what is next after installing flow and pull for your product family this is it.
Relevance to the lean manager 9/10
Relevance to the lean practitioner8/10
Clarity/Organization8/10
Original Content9/10
... Read more

Book Description
With 300 figures, tables, and equations, this book presents a unified approach to image quality research and modeling. The author discusses the results of different, calibrated psychometric experiments can be rigorously integrated to construct predictive software using Monte Carlo simulations and provides numerous examples of viable field applications for product design and verification of modeling predictions. He covers perceptual measurements for the assessment of individual quality attributes and overall quality, explores variation in scene susceptibility, observer sensitivity, and preference, and includes methods of analysis for testing and refining metrics based on psychometric data. ... Read more

Book Description
A practical introduction on today's challenge of controlling and managing the water resources used by and affected by cities and urbanized communities. The book offers an integrated engineering approach, covering the spectrum of urban watershed management, urban hydraulic systems, and overall stormwater management.

Each chapter concludes with helpful problems.

Solutions Manual available to qualified professors and instructors upon request.

Introduces the reader to two popular, non-proprietary computer-modeling pro-grams: HEC-HMS (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) and SWMM (U.S EPA). ... Read more

Book Description
Taguchi Techniques Made Easier Than Ever! Regardless of your experience with statistics, the Second Edition of Taguchi Techniques for Quality Engineering, by Saturn quality engineer Phillip J. Ross, shows you step-by-step how to design effective experiments to reduce variation, improve the quality of products and processes, and slash development time and costs. Now organized in the chronological order of the DOE process, this revised and updated edition give you the tools to exploit: the loss function concept--to quantify the cost of product and process variations; orthogonal experiment design--to pinpoint areas where variation may be reduced; parameter and tolerance design--to reduce variations in products and processes at little or no cost. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Great Introduction to Taguchi Methods
I have been a fan of Taguchi methods for some 16 years now due to their simplicity and understandability. Dr. Taguchi gave all engineers a great gift when he took statistical design of experiments(DOE) out of the realm of esoteric statistical academia and made it digestable for the average engineer. Mr. Ross has furthered this noble effort by writing an easily-read compendium explaining DOE per Taguchi's approach! Highly recommended!

A complete course for Taguchi Engineering Techniques
Maybe the most known and recurrently used Taguchi techniques are the Orthogonal Arrays for DOE; but they're not the only ones that Taguchi developed in order to achieve a quality product design. The Loss Function, the S/N ratio and the Tolerance Design are part of the "Robust Engineering" that consolidated Taguchi as the quality guru he is.

Many general DOE concepts are so well explained in this book that it represents a great introductory text to this subject. Nevertheless this is a Taguchi techniques book, not a complete DOE text, so it's possible that you'd like to look for "Design and Analysis of Experiments" by Douglas C. Montgomery.

This book is highly valuable if you want to understand the Taguchi philosophy for developing quality products and a must have for DOE beginners.

Great book for anyone with no practical experience in DOE
Seems to be written for people with no background in designing experiments.Gives you a good start and gives you the basic information on Taguchi methods.A favorite of Engineering students since it is extremely easy to follow.Great first book for someone starting out with Design of Experiments.Covers the full problem solving process with DOE being a part of the process.

Minimal information is given regarding Classical DOE.If you have an academic or Engineering background and are interested in learning experimental designs other than Taguchi methods, then buy the "Statistics for Experimenters: An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building" By: George E. P. Box, et al. -- the Classical DOE reference handbook for Engineers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

A Must Reference for all Product Marketing Professionals...
Quality Function Deployment is an excellent tool for mapping market requirements into product features. Cohen's book does a superb job of presenting the basics and taking you deeper into advanced topics. Numerous practical examples are included to give you a clear picture of how to use this powerful tool in your new product development.

One of the most comprehensive QFD books
If I had to select a single book about QFD this is the one.It so thoroughly covers this effective technique, down to nuances, that I would have to refer to at least five other books on QFD I own to get the same coverage.

For a complete beginner chapters 1 and 2 cover the what and why of QFD. However, this material is somewhat brief and the following chapters may be overwhelming if you are learning about this technique for the first time.As an aside, if you are using Visio, there is a template for QFD that ships with that product.

The remaining 17 chapters lead you through fundamental aspects of QFD (Chapters 3 through 11), starting with an overview of the seven TQM tools, and leading you through the basic planning matrix, technical response, relationships, correlations, benchmarks and targets.Part III, Chapters 12 and 13, tie QFD to product development and its associated lifecycle, and how it relates to marketing, engineering, sales and service.

Chapters 14 through 17 provide a detailed, step-by-step approach to using QFD, starting with planning and data/information gathering, and culminating in developing and analyzing results.

The final section of the book covers advanced topics, including four-phase models, complex matrices of matrices, and special applications that include strategic product planning, and organizational planning, among other topics. I found the chapter on how to apply QFD to software development particularly interesting since that is what I do for a living.

I have a number of QFD books and actively employ this technique, and this is the definitive book on the topic I recommend.

Comprehensive overview, but incomplete in how to try it out
This was an excellent introduction to QFD, which I'd previously heard many good things about. I now feel that I understand how it works, how to marry it with the software development process in general, and even managed to pick up some hints on how I might integrate some more advanced customer representation ideas (like use of personas instead of instances of customers, for when your customer base is too large).

However, it was stated many times that:
1) You should have someone who has lead a QFD before facilitating it
2) It's highly customizable, by cutting things out

It would've been nice understand how to go about a first QFD with no experienced facilitators, along with some warning signs about whether you're going right or wrong. Also, examples of the customizations folks have made for smaller or larger teams and less or more rigorous organizations would've made it more concrete how to roll it out on a team such as my own.

Best Practitioners Reference to QFD I've found
I found the Cohen book to be the reference to Quality Function Deployment that I have been looking for.Unlike many of the Japanese books on the subject that have been translated to english, Cohen's book provides a comprehensive look at the subject of QFD, from the history of QFD through the final chapters that guide one through the mechanics of conducting a QFD study.I particularly like the no-nonsense writing style and the step-by-step approach taken to explain the method without going into tediously technical details about all the potential mathematics involved.This is the first book that I have found on the subject of QFD that I could actually USE to complete a QFD study.I also found that the method described is not dependent on any specific QFD software, but works with any of the 3 QFD software packages that I use.If you have to have just one reference for Quality Function Deployment, this is the book I would choose.

More examples please
I, an engineer turned marketer, love to learn by example. Stop telling me about how it works...show me.

THE COMPLETE LACK OF SAMPLES was very disappointing. I feel my understanding would have been much deeper if theauthor had walked through hypothetical/real examples.

The book does areasonably good job describing the various steps of performing the QFDprocess. Samples would have made it much richer. ... Read more

Book Description

Billions of dollars are being spent annually world-wide to develop reliable and good quality products and services. Global competition and other factors are forcing manufacturers and others to produce highly reliable and good quality products and services. This means that reliability and quality principles are now being applied across many diverse sectors of economy and each of these sectors (robotics, health care, power generation, the Internet, textile, food and software) has tailored reliability and quality principles, methods, and procedures to satisfy its specific need.

Book Description
Responsible For Reliability? Look No Further! Finally, a working tool that delivers expert guidance on all aspects of product reliability. W. Grant Ireson and Clyde F Coombs, Jr.'s new Second Edition of Handbook of Reliability Engineering and Management gives you the specific engineering, management, and mathematics data you need to design and manufacture more reliable electronic and mechanical devices as well as complete systems. You'll find proven industry practices for defining and achieving reliability goals--real how-to information, not theoretical generalities. You also get new methods for determining overall product reliability. . .the latest design techniques for extending a product's life cycle. . .tested strategies for incorporating reliability into new product development. . .and more. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Wait for the NEXT Edition.
"Handbook of Reliability Engineering and Management", Second Edition,Edited by W. Grant Ireson, Clyde F. Coombs, Jr. and Richard Y. Moss,McGraw Hill, 1996.

This is the second edition of the Handbook, which first appeared in 1988.There are individual contributing authors for each of the 27 chapters; the resultant is already out of date.The current "Limbo" status of military documents, such as Military Standard 105 and Military Handbook 217F, makes this present edition of the Handbook out of date in 2000. Will Military Handbook 217F ever be revised to provide up-to-date models for the failure rates of modern electronic components?

This Handbook would benefit from better editing.For example, as a Handbook, it is expected that the index in the back of the physical book would contain page references to pertinent reliability terms and techniques.Today's technology emphasizes Environmental Stress Screening, ESS.The term, ESS, has been around for at least 15 years (or so: I recall doing an IEEE paper on ESS in 1988). It is expected that ESS and related terms such as HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Testing) and HASS, would be readily found in the Handbook's index.They are not.

Same thing holds true for Software Reliability, where the chapter's author uses the cute term, "SMERFS Model" (p. 22.15),but this term will not be found in the index. (SMERFS = Statistical Modeling and estimation of reliability functions for software.)By the way, from a technical point of view, this chapter'shalf page on the various modelsfor software reliability is very skimpy.For example, Dr. Michael Elbert has written an entire IEEE paper on the selection of the proper model for software reliability.It would be expected that a Handbook would be more complete than just a small portion of a page.In Chapter 22, on Software Reliability, the author references a paper on the Rayleigh curve by "Gaffney" (p. 22.13).The reference at the back of Chapter 22 gives the reference's name as "John Gafney".This is a discrepancy that should have been caught by the editors.I suspect that the correct spelling is "Gaffney", but both can not be correct.

There are other editorial lapses:on page 16.24, Bellcore failure rates are compared to MIL-HDBK-217, and it is state thatBellcore "... provides generally better failure rates than does MIL-HDBK-217F, which is supposedly based on field experience in communications equipment." The way this sentence is presented implies that MIL-HDBK-217F is based upon experience in communications equipment, when, as most reliability practitioners know, MIL-HDBK-217F failure rates are based on environments from Ground, Fixed, to Ground, Benign, to Naval Sheltered and Airborne, etc, and on equipment from radios to radars to sonars, air data computers and fire control units.This inconsistency in the use of the language ought to have been caught by the editors.

On page 16.6, there is a nice comparison of FITs to failures per million hours to %failure per 1000 hours. The Editors should make the reader aware that a billion in American usage (1 with nine zeroes after it) is not the same as European usage.Chapter 6, on FMEAs is totally into the Risk Priority Number method where "gray beards" sit around and use the "Delphi" approach to ascertainthe probability of an event, the severity of that failure and whether or not the failure can be detected.This is a very subjective method, and, in my humble opinion, RPN is being supercededby more objective, quantitative methods (see IEC 61508).

In summary, prudent purchasers should await the next edition of this Handbook, if that edition considers all the changes taking place in the availability of military standards and the new leadership role of international standards in the reliability arena.For example, IEC 300, on "Dependability" is not even mentioned.

John Peter Rooney, ASQ Certified Reliability Engineer #2425. ... Read more

Book Description
This book covers a broad range of topics necessary for those managing engineering personnel, projects and organizations. ... Read more

Book Description
This book is about the use of modern statistical methods for quality control and improvement. It provides comprehensive coverage of the subject from basic principles to state-of-art concepts and applications. The objective is to give the reader a sound understanding of the principles and the basis for applying them in a variety of both product and nonproduct situations. While statistical techniques are emphasized throughout, the book has a strong engineering and management orientation. Guidelines are given throughout the book for selecting the proper type of statistical technique to use in a wide variety of product and nonproduct situations. By presenting theory, and supporting the theory with clear and relevant examples, Montgomery helps the reader to understand the big picture of important concepts. Updated to reflect contemporary practice and provide more information on management aspects of quality improvement. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great learning source
I found this book to be a good source for review on how the author came up with the formulas and MINI-TAB references were good. I would have rated it 5 stars but there were settings in the MINI-TAB software that needed to be turned on and for a beginning student I found it a little difficult to come up with the same answers without knowing why the author used the non-default mini-tab settings. ... Read more

Book Description
* International importance * Task-based, not standard specific * Non industry specific Many quality systems have been established by implementing the requirements of ISO 9000 but they have frequently resulted in task based systems of documentation rather than documented management systems. The 1990s have seen a rise in popularity of techniques such as TQM, Business Process Reengineering, and Process Management thus causing a rethink of ISO 9000 based quality systems. This book shows how you can use systems engineering principles combined with process flow charting techniques to design and develop an integrated quality system that reflects how you run your business. Details are provided on how to produce and manage systems using both paper and electronic based documentation with guidance provided on designing and selecting various software packages. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Different from the other handbooks on ISO 9000.
This text helps you develop a new, better system than what you had before. It is not your typical "do what you say / say what you do" approach. Want to change your business? Look here. ... Read more

Book Description
This book includes an introduction to some important reliability concepts and a review of terminology. The work is divided into three sections: modelling, evaluation and assurance. ... Read more