Quality Control and Improvement

IE 380 teaches you to treat quality as a measurable, controllable property of a production process rather than a vague end-state — the core idea is that variation is the enemy, and statistics is how you find it, bound it, and engineer it out. You'll spend the semester building and interpreting control charts, computing capability indices, designing factorial experiments (including Taguchi-style robust designs), and working through acceptance sampling plans, mostly via homework sets and case-style exercises out of Montgomery. It leans heavily on the inferential statistics you picked up in earlier IE probability courses and feeds directly into production-systems and operations electives, where assuming a process is "in control" is a prerequisite you'll now know how to actually verify.