Plant and Equipment: Quality Engineering

The general principles and concepts of quality engineering and its most closely associated methods and tools are reviewed. Different approaches are available to modern industries that ultimately target the same overall objective: to design and operate a process so that the variability of the outcome is minimized and therefore the quality indicators of the resulting products are highly consistent, in spite of variability in uncontrolled factors. The most influential is arguably the Taguchi method for robust engineering design, partly because practice and the success of Japanese industry in the 1970s and 1980s made it popular, and partly because it can be deployed with minimum cost implications. This article presents the most relevant concepts, and relates them to process analytical technologies, statistical process control, and six sigma. These concepts are very relevant to the dairy industry, as increased competition erodes business margins, and therefore quality losses must be minimized and quality consistency is crucial.