Multivariate Total Quality Control: Foundation and Recent Advances

In the last decades, the production of goods and the offer of services have become quite complex activities mostly because of the markets globalisation, of the continuous push to the innovation and of the constant requests from more and more demanding markets. The main objective of a company system has become the achievement of the quality for the business management cycle. This cycle goes from the design (Plan) to the production (Do), from the control (Check) to the man­ agement (Action), as well as to the marketing and distribution. Nowadays, the Total Quality of the company system is evaluated, according to the ISO 9000 regulations, in terms of its capacity to adjust the design and the pro­ duction to the needs expressed (explicitly or implictly) by the final users of a product/service. In this process, the use of statistical techniques is essential not only in the classical approach of Quality Control of a product but also, and most importantly, in the Quality Design oriented to the satisfaction of customers. Thus, Total Quality refers to the global capacity of a company to fit its system to the real needs of its customers by designing products which are able to match the customers' taste and by implementing a statistical control of both the product and the Customer Satisfaction. In such a process of design and evaluation, several statistical variables are involved and with a different nature (numerical, categorical, ordinal).