Quality Management
Summary
Quality management encompasses the coordinated activities that direct and control an organisation with regard to quality. It integrates quality planning, assurance, control and improvement to meet stakeholder requirements and enhance performance. Through defined policies, objectives and processes, organisations identify customer needs, establish standards, monitor outcomes and implement corrective actions. Principles such as customer focus, leadership, engagement of people, process approach, evidence-based decision-making and continual improvement provide a systematic framework. Quality management systems range from generic models like ISO 9001 to industry-specific approaches incorporating risk-based thinking, performance metrics and supply-chain coordination. As global competition intensifies and supply chains grow more complex, robust quality management underpins product reliability, operational efficiency and regulatory compliance while fostering innovation, sustainability and stakeholder trust.
Research from Nature Portfolio
Recent work has advanced robust measures for assessing capability of non-normal processes. Third-generation capability indices based on dispersion measures such as median absolute deviation, interquartile range and Gini’s mean difference were evaluated under Weibull models, revealing that median absolute deviation offers stable estimates across skewed conditions while quantile indices exhibit bias at high asymmetry. Bootstrap confidence intervals were tailored to each index, with bias-corrected percentile intervals suited to quantile-based measures and percentile-t intervals for median-based indices. Validation on industrial fatigue-life data confirmed that these robust indices outperform classical methods, providing practitioners with refined tools for capability analysis where normality cannot be assumed.
Another study developed confidence intervals for the process yield index using joint confidence regions of unilateral Six Sigma quality indices. By integrating the yield index formula with statistical tolerance limits for upper and lower specification boundaries, the method produces interval estimates that enable precise inferences on process performance. Application to micro-disk integrator circuit production illustrated how these intervals support decision-making on capability and improvement opportunities, allowing manufacturers to quantify uncertainty in yield measures and target resources more effectively.
Quality Management publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in quality management across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Capability index (Cₚ, Cₚₖ): Numerical measures comparing process spread and centring against specification limits to quantify process capability under normality assumptions.
Bootstrap confidence interval: A resampling method to estimate the variability and confidence bounds of a statistic, such as a capability or yield index, without strict parametric assumptions.
Power transformation: A mathematical technique that applies an exponent to data in order to stabilise variance and reduce skewness before applying normal-distribution-based analyses.
Process yield index: A measure of the proportion of output meeting specifications, often formulated from bilateral or unilateral tolerance indices in Six Sigma frameworks.
Cost of quality (CoQ): The sum of costs related to prevention, appraisal and failure activities, used to quantify the financial impact of quality investments and losses.
Model-predictive control: An advanced control strategy that uses dynamic process models and optimisation algorithms to predict and adjust future process settings for desired quality outcomes.
References
- Fundamentals, Structure and Key Characteristics.
- Robust process capability indices Cpm and Cpmk using Weibull process. Scientific Reports (2023).
- Product quality evaluation by confidence intervals of process yield index. Scientific Reports (2022).
- Quality cost management in the SMEs of Poland. The TQM Journal (2020).
- Industry 4.0 In-Line AI Quality Control of Plastic Injection Molded Parts. Polymers (2022).
About these summaries
This Nature Research Intelligence Topic summary is created with the cited references and a large language model. We take care to ground generated text with facts, and have systems in place to gain human feedback on the overall quality of the process in line with our AI principles. We strive to create accurate and useful summaries for people unfamiliar with the research topic and that supports this goal. These pages are a beta release and will be updated as we learn how best to help people gain value from a research topic summary.
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