Development of User-friendly SPC Software and Its Contribution

Abstract

In Korea about 95% of manufacturing industries are small and medium sized ones. The IT environment for the statistical process control (SPC) of those small and medium industries was not well established in early 1990s. When we investigated their circumstances for SPC in the middle of 1990s, there were some typical problems. We developed the basic SPC software named as "100 PPM Quality Renovation Software" in 1998 as a government project supported by the Small and Medium Industry Administration and the Korean Standards Association. When we designed this software, we carefully considered the above problems to be solved. During last 5 years, we have let industry people, individual consultants, professors, and university students download freely from the website of our research laboratory (seaq.hanyang.ac.kr) and answered all the questions that users asked about SPC tools and their uses by phone and e-mails. Among those questions, we found some good points for upgrading. In 2002, Ministry of Industry and Energy conducted a survey research on the current status of quality management in the domestic industries including manufacturing and service industries. Among about 473 out of 1000 answered industries, 40.6% has been using this 100PPM S/W for their quality improvement activities. In this paper, we present our ways to help small and medium sized industries improve quality by our user-friendly SPC software.