Customer Reviews

Introduction to Statistical Quality Control

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Doug Montgomery is an excellent instructor and author. I have taken short courses from him. He teaches statistics in the Engineering School at Arizona State. He is known for his books on engineering statistics and has written some excellent texts on design of experiments, response surface methodology, linear regression and quality control. He is well acquainted with the Deming philosophy for quality , Taguchi designs and the six sigma concept. This book on statistical quality control introduces control chart methods and all the other tools of statistical quality control with the expertise that few have.

The book is very accessible to statisticians engineers and others with good mathematical backgrounds but not necessarily strong trtaining in statistics. A virtue of Montgomery in all the books he has authored or coauthored is the clarity of presentation and the ability to reach a wide audience of non-statisticians.

The book gives an overview of the importance of quality management, the basics of statistics (variability, distributions, etc.), different methods of statistical process control, the use of control charts, capability analysis, design of experiments, process optimization, and sampling. I found all of the chapters informational and practical.

Montgomery does a great job of presenting the theory, giving examples, and helping the reader understand the big picture of various concepts. For example, Montgomery states that a "Pareto chart does not automatically identify the most important defects, but rather only those that occur most frequently," and then gives an example illustrating when this can be so. This is something that might have been overlooked if not pointed out to the reader.

While to book is rather current in introductory theory and practice, there are some relics from previous editions. For example, the inclusion of a random number table in the appendix is rather useless, since all modern calculators and spreadsheets have random number functions. This minor complaint aside, the book is solid and worth having.

This is a rather comprehensive book on SQC. It benefits from a good introductory treatment of Design of Experiments, a subject sorely missing from most SQC texts. The arrangement of topics in the book is logical from both pedagogical and practical points of view, and the author's stress on improvement -- rather than control -- is the right one for the readers.

This is a typical college text book which serves very well on the subject,SQC. It has provided a good coverage on SQC, in particular, as an introductory text. Each SQC subject is treated well from a newcomer perspective. If you're a beginner in the college education and looking for a book on this subject, this is IT!

If you want to take your knowledge of statistics and see how it is applied in the arena of Statistical Process Control (SPC) this book is a great place to start. A prior background in statistics will be very helpful in understanding the underlying concepts. A more basic introduction to some of the underlying distributions discussed may help the concepts make more sense. Overall, the text seems quite comprehensive in its coverage of SPC. It should give a newcomer to the field a firm foundation for further exploration.

This is a good book to have if you're an engineer or someone that likes to observe and measure the behavior of things. It is very well explained and has a lot of examples that you can use to better understand the subject.
On a bad note, it has a lot of typographical errors in some formulas that if you are learning them by the first time you may end up with the wrong result. If you can, buy the 6th edition; I haven't seen that many typos.

I started browsing the book, as is my habit whenever I buy a new book, with the idea of doing an in-depth reading later. But, the subject matter is so vividly covered, I could not. Here is a book I could not keep back until I completed the first 4 chapters in my first reading itself.
It all started with the modern definition of quality as stated in the book "Quality is inversely proportional to variability". This definition, later led me to explore more into six sigma concepts to reduce variation before getting to ISO registration by any company. Nothing can be truer than the fact or statement in the book on ISO registration that "many quality engineering authorities feel that ISO registration is largely a waste of effort". I am one among them.
This kind of striking information, style of presentation, and the font type are so good that they tempt you to explore more into the book.

I enjoyed the 2-page info on legal aspects of quality, notes on Average Run Length (ARL) and was amazed by the fact that even an in-control process will go out-of-control automatically after 370 samples /observations due to the fact that 3sigma control limits
comprise only 99.73% good items.
Another area I liked most is the Hypothesis testing of assumptions or conditions in quality improvement situation.
Not many books explain so well the Confidence Intervals (CI) and Hypothesis testing.
When I read further into this Montgomery's work on "Introduction to Statistical Quality Control", I was doubly happy to have at last a solid book on SQC.
It so happened that when I started underlining some important points (that is the respect I give to good books), I had to underline almost all of the pages in his book (Not overdoing).I am sure, so will you do.

I plan to add more interesting areas, in stages, from this book that I liked best as I re-read and as an honor to such a great Author.

As the developer of the QI Macros SPC Software for Excel, customers often call with exotic questions about statistical methods for quality control.

Montgomery's book, more often than not, is the one I turn to for answers that I can't seem to find anywhere else. Even if I do find the answer in another book, it's always easier to understand in Montgomery's. The book is written in a way that makes seemingly incomprehensible statistics understandable. And there are plenty of examples.

If you're looking for a book to help you implement quality control in a small business, Montgomery's book is a bit too much, so you might consider my book on the Small Business Guerrilla Guide to Six Sigma or Six Sigma Simplified.

Used this book in a graduate level course on SPC. The book and the excercises were interesting and highly informative, as are all of Dr. Montgomery's numerous texts. Most concepts are backed up with liberal examples to help understand the theory and cement the concept and their practical applications, and run the whole gamut from management to electrical engineering problems. Many of the tables in the back of the book, such as the random number table, are outdated due to computers, however these may have been dropped in the new version of the text.

This is a different book from the hardcover version. We did a quick comparison with the regular textbook and some of the questions were different. This will make it very difficult to complete assignments. At the bottom of the cover it says this is the International Version. Also, it states in large print "this book is not to be sold in the US".