An effective decision making method for product acceptance

Abstract

Acceptance sampling plans are practical tools for quality assurance applications involving quality contract on product orders. The sampling plans provide the vendor and buyer decision rules for product acceptance to meet the preset product quality requirement. As the rapid advancement of manufacturing technology, suppliers require their products to be of high quality with very low fraction of defectives often measured in parts per million. Unfortunately, traditional methods for calculating fraction of defectives no longer work since any sample of reasonable size probably contains no defective product items. In this paper, we introduce an effective sampling plan based on process capability index C-pk to deal with product acceptance determination for low fraction of defectives. The proposed new sampling plan is developed based on the exact sampling distribution rather than approximation. Practitioners can use the proposed method to determine the number of required inspection units, the critical acceptance value, and make reliable decisions in product acceptance. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.