Quality is an increasingly important component of competitive advantage for the modern corporation. Measuring quality and performance is a key step in achieving better quality. Although many statistical methods are available for determining quality, there remains no guide to easy learning and implementation. This book fills that gap, providing stepwise procedures and rules of thumb in an applied presentation and accompanying each concept with an example to illustrate the method. The authors examine the entire product lifecycle and the tools and techniques necessary to measure quality at each stage, explaining such topics as optimization, Taguchi's method, variability reduction, and graphic methods.