ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss three inspection methods: judgment inspections, informative inspections and source inspection. Many plants conduct judgment inspections, that is, inspections whose sole purpose is to categorize finished products as defective or acceptable after processing has been completed. There are some cases in which it is thought that judgment inspections have been made considerably more rational by having been automated. The characteristics of so-called Statistical Quality Control systems include, the notion of informative inspections, which use statistically, based control charts to reduce future defects by feeding back information about defects to the offending processes. The major conceptual advance represented by informative inspections was obscured by the shadow of inductive statistics. The implementation of a successive check system leads without exception to a lowering of the defect rate to one-fifth to one-tenth of the previous value in the space of a single month.
