It is discussed how to educate the practically useful SQC (statistical quality control). When a company holds an in-house training of SQC, there possibly exist several problems, which are the problem of selecting trainees, the problem of preparing adequate homework and examinations, the problem of engaging practical applications, the problem of evaluating the results and the problem of promoting a thoughtful secretary. In order to overcome these problems, a passionate support by the top is necessary and the existence of stars on SQC in the company is desired. As a guidepost for training a star, one particular topic is introduced, which is the way that one interprets the partial regression coefficients in regression equations. Furthermore, several topics which should be considered to use both the Taguchi methods and the SQC effectively are presented.

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The establishment of computer networks has brought about an age of substantial information disclosure, in which various branches of knowledge and types of technologies that read and utilize statistical data are becoming increasingly important. In university education, regardless of the field-natural sciences or social sciences-the knowledge of statistics is essential in conducting experimental studies. For this reason, various faculties and departments in many universities adopt basic courses related to statistics. This paper reports how to advance higher education for statistics in Japan as well as what it was.

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A series of educational quality assurance activities is introduced to develop management professionals in newly established Japanese professional graduate schools. The graduates should not get merely technical knowledge on management sciences but competencies necessary for a manager's behavior. The graduate school of business sciences in Tsukuba University proposed "the competency guideline" for a management professional and suggested a series of appropriate education methods to develop different competencies based on discussions by representatives of Japanese business schools and industries. and develop its educational system to develop all the competencies systematically. Since the author was responsible to develop a new lecture on "the principle of quantitative researches" highly related to statistical thinking in management field, the key objectives and methods of the lecture are also explained to clarify our new idea for management professional education.

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In toyota, SQC is an effective tool for practical problem solving. We think SQC development process is education, practical use, and result. According to this process, we describe 1) the history of SQC development activities in our company, 2) some recent activities of SQC study meeting in the company, administrative staff activities aimed the SQC application domain expansion and the SQC practical use frequency improvement.

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A tendency accelerates the recent production more "small" "briefly" "thinly" "lightly". The company catches a change of the manufacturing in such situation precisely and must do stable production. However, it is difficult for the change of the production to detect the change extremely small. The company uses a method called the statistical quality control to realize stable manufacturing. There are many companies performing statistical quality control for employee education. However, there is the aspect that it is difficult to perform statistical quality control education for of the effect and continuation in the spot of the manufacturing in a company. I introduce this report about the factor that change contents of the statistical quality control education in my company and practical use to the manufacturing spread out.

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NHK Spring Co., Ltd. [NHK], which I belong to, produces key parts in many fields such as the automotive industry, home electrical appliances industry and PC hard disk, etc. Since entering NHK in 1987, I have been able to be involved with quality improvement activities in many fields such as car interior, furniture, home electrical appliances, and PC hard disk. In April 2001, NHK established the Statistical Quality Control [SQC] promotion project team (6-year project) at the head office. I was chosen as the project team's first member (2-year term), and I studied SQC at the QC basic course [BC] of Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers [JUSE]. In August 2002, I invented a quality improvement scenario "SOUTH-FLOW^[○!R]", which is useful for any In-process chronic defects extermination in the manufacturing industry. "SOUTH-FLOW^[○!R]" which consists of 11 steps to solve a quality problem is approved as a business model patent in Japan. I am introducing "SOUTH-FLOW^[○!R]", the development process, the characteristics, its application to business, its expansion and potential implementation issues. I would be honored if "SOUTH-FLOW^[○!R]" enhances your quality improvement activities.

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I have promoted "Practical SQC" against the departments that have necessity to solve the issues. Recently, I have been getting down to applying DOE, HOPE and Taguchi-method to the subjects in R & D field particularly. As Discovery by the use of SQC, I would like to report on the actual learning through these activities.

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Since 1985, our company have been developing and marketing Statistical Analysis Software and delivering support service for domestic and international customers, our major customers are manufacturing engineers, development engineers and quality engineers. In this paper, we report the progress of our product development and the features of our product users. In addition, we report our efforts to collaboration with customers which is important to make our product and service more valuable in business, and also report the challenges about it.

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Customer orientation is an important driver of business performance. In order to measure the development of customer orientation over time, managers conduct CS (customer satisfaction) surveys for several years and interpret CS variations as linked to their firm's actions. Based on time-series data from three durable goods industries and a hospital, this study identifies significant influences of economic growth and economic expectations on firm-level CS. This means that CS variations are not only caused by firm-level actions but also by economic processes. Managers should be careful when interpreting economic-induced CS variations as consequences of their own actions. This article thus proposes two methods to correct CS scores by removing economic influences: 1) remove the influence of economic expectations, 2) remove the influence of economic growth and economic expectations. It is shown that these methods strongly reinforce the correlation between CS scores and future business performance. These results demonstrate that correcting CS scores helps managers gain performance-relevant information that cannot be read from the original scores.

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