Industrial statistics and its recent contributions to total quality in the Netherlands

The use of statistical methods in quality management has a long history. Most of the pioneers, such as Walter A. Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming, refer to themselves as statisticians. Statistical thinking in industry means that all work is a series of interconnected processes, that all processes show variation, and that a reduction in variation is the key for continuous improvement. In the statistical literature we find several approaches to achieve this: quality by inspection, quality by process control and quality by design. In this paper we give a survey of the contributions of Dutch statisticians during the last five years.