CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.0 INTRODUCTION
The idea of using statistical quality control in production setting has its beginning in 1924 by Walter Shewhart of the Bell Telephone Laboratory.
All organization that produce goods and services for the entire populace, always aim at producing and providing such goods that are acceptable by consumers.
Quality control in recent times has become a necessary tool operation to all organization, whose goal is to excel and remain in business. This is apparent because the quality of a product or services is the measure of the ability of a product or service, to fulfill or satisfy consumers implicit expectation or explicit requirement.
However, the American Standard Institute defines quality control as, the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bears on it the ability to satisfy a given need. Thus to obtain the desired quality, it becomes imperative to control all the factor that will impart the necessary or needed quality on the product or service.
In addition, the objective of quality control is to provide quality that is satisfactory in the term of safety, adequacy, reliability and economy, particularly in this period of advancement in industrial development, which much emphasis is put on standard for products.
In some industries measurement, inspection and testing are done frequently by people or with devices to ascertain that the required quality is sent into the market.
Statistical quality control method enables us to obtain maximum benefit out of production and inspection at lowest cost. It is one of the most useful economic applications of the theory of sampling and is significant in industries.
Furthermore, it is apparent of the danger associated with dependent on mono-cultural type of economy which is characterized in most of the developing countries since worldwide out glut of 1982, it has become totally clear that the petroleum oil is a major export commodity cannot salvage the entire economy of the country. Thus, concerted effort has to be made for diversification; this entails generating foreign exchange.
This could only be done effectively by making our locally manufactured product more competitive in terms of quality and price hence, the need for a dynamic quality control system is needed.
A total quality control system fundamentally involves the specification of what is required, product designed to meet the specification. The inspection to guarantee the conformity with standard, with at the back of our mind, we know that production being defined as the process of manufacturing goods and services for human consumptions is incomplete until the said products reaches the final consumer. In this context reaching the final consumer here implies the consumer accepting the product.