Process health care: Prevention and therapy

Shortcomings in conventional process adjustment policies offered by either the Statistical Process Control (SPC) approach or 'Out-of-Tolerance' postmortem reaction could be overcome by using a modern strategy based on Integrated Process Control (IPC). The latter combines continuous quality assessment and stability evaluation on a concurrent basis, and therefore characterizes process' ability to maintain the achieved quality over time. IPC joins Statistics and Quality diagnosis. This preventive approach transfers the right to decide when a process should be cured from the statistician to the quality practitioner.