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Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 4/, No. 2

studies would have proved helpful. There are many illustrations, graphs and figures provided to clarify the text. This clarification is at times negated by a number of errors in some of the early diagrams, which hamper the otherwise clear flow of the argument and frustrate the reader.

The book is aimed at the manager responsible for new product development within an organiz-ation. It may prove most useful to those in smaller organizations where the new product develop-ment process is not as clearly defined and screened as it might be. There are many suggestions and exercises given to aid the reader in relating the text to his or her own organization, and this again may be most beneficial to the new product manager. The lack of discussion of economic analysis and marketing models renders the book incomplete and is likely to frustrate those operational researchers working in new product development.

Tools and Methods for the Improvement of Quality H. G1now, S. G1now, A. OPPENHEIM and R. OPPENHEIM Irwin, Holmwood, Jllinois, 1989. 603 pp. US$39.95 ISBN 0 256 05680 3

JOHN PRESTON

This is the best book I have read on how practically to improve quality. I found myself frequently dipping into it during the course of my work, and I was never disappointed. The authors have produced a book that combines theory with practical examples, and also identifies many of the pitfalls in practice.

The book progresses in a structured way, first introducing the broad concepts of quality, then introducing the basic concepts of statistics. The section on control charts is extensive, covering all the control charts in common use, including charts for individuals, but excluding cusum. Diag-nosing a process covers brainstorming, cause and effect, and Pareto diagrams. It then considers the relationships between specification and process capability, and case studies of quality improve-ment. It closes with an overview of Taguchi methods plus kp rules for inspection. Throughout, the book ties in with the Deming philosophy of quality and Deming's 14 points.

A typical example of the book's approach would be Pareto analysis, where failures are grouped by categories and then drawn as a histogram in descending order of frequency of category. It carefully takes the reader through defining the categories, collecting the data, constructing a fre-quency table, then producing a Pareto diagram. It also stresses 'good housekeeping', identifying where/when/ how the data was collected. The next stage (which is the most important, but which too often books skim over) is the analysis of the root cause of the failure. It explains the procedure by two examples, first of key-punch errors and secondly of accidents. Pareto has been termed the 80/20 rule; i.e. 80% of the failures are caused by 20% of the categories. The authors admit that this is dependent on the selection of categories and is not just an automatic outcome, unlike other books on quality techniques.

The only criticisms are the absence of cusum (cumulative sum) charts and insufficient detail on non-normal distributions.

This book could be used by almost anyone interested in quality improvement ; the style is easy and the examples are well chosen to illustrate the essentials of the techniques. I would recommend this as an excellent first read for those new to the subject. It could also be used as the basis for a series of lectures on the application of OR to quality.

W. McNALLY

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