A New Way to Teach Statistics to Engineers

In May 1999 Richard Parry-Jones, Group Vice-President Product Development & Quality, Ford Motor Company, delivered the Royal Academy of Engineering Manufacturing Lecture. He covered three themes, namely customer insight, engineering manufacturing quality and wealth creation & shareholder value. Within the second theme he described the importance of taking into account, while keeping a keen eye on quality, variability in engineering design. The lecture, comprising nearly 30 pages of typed script and 57 PowerPoint slides, can be found at www.raeng.co.uk/Statements/pubs/CorpSuccess/index.htm The importance of using statistics and statistical thinking for managing variability in product design was emphasised time and again through well thought through and illustrated examples. Furthermore he suggested that the approach to teaching statistics to engineers should be somewhat more radical than has been the case within UK higher education in recent years….The article outlines how the Ford Motor Company has worked with RSS and IEE at ensuring the use of statistics at ensuring quality by closely monitoring variability in engineering design. Ford have created training material on the design and manufacture of a fuel filler cap…