Design of Screening Procedures: A Review

Summary: It has been well accepted that dependence on inspection to correct quality problems is ineffective and costly, and hence screening (100% inspection) should not be used as a long-term solution for improving product quality. However, screening may be an attractive practice for removing nonconforming items from a population in the short term because of the advances in automatic inspection equipment and computer control in manufacturing. Important factors considered in designing screening procedures include the selection of screening variable, available information on the population being studied, cost of inspection, losses caused by decision errors, the variation in product quality, and inspection and manufacturing environments. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on the design of screening procedures.